INT^CONTACT 
N  TEACHING 


TTERSON  Du  BoiS 


Southern  Branch 
of  the 

University  of  California 

Los  Angeles  i 


'his  book  is  DUE  on  the  last  date  stamp 

i 

■  ly 


The  Point  of  Contact  in  Teaching 


/^>' 


v> 


The 

Point  of  Contact 
In   Teachini 


BY 

PATTERSON  DUBOIS 

Formerly  a  Secretary  of  the  American  Philosophical  Society 

Fellow  of  the  American  Association  for  the 

Advancement  of  Science,  etc. 


FOURTH  EDITION  REVISED  AND  ENLARCEC 


NEW  YORK 

DODD,  MEAD  tS:  COMPANY 

1901 


35005 


CoPYRir.HT,  iSq6  AKO  1900 

BY 

PATTERSON  DU  BOIS 


L  CL 
377 


By  the  same  author 
Beckonings  from  Little  Hands 


PREFACE 

The   child   mind    is   a  castle  that  can   be  ^ 
taken  neither  by  stealth  nor  by  storm.     But 
there  is  a  natural  way  of  approach  and  a  gate 
of  easy  entry  always  open  to  him  who  knows 
how  to  find  it. 

The  ideal  point  at  which  a  child's  intel- 
ligent attention  is  to  be  first  engaged,  or  his 
instruction  is  to  begin,  is  an  experience  or »/ 
point  of  contact  with  life.  One  who  under- 
stands this  truth  need  seldom  have  any  great 
difliculty  in  getting  an  entry  into  the  child's 
mind. 

This  little  manual  is  an  expansion  of  a 
small  monograph  issued  in  1896  under  the 
title  "  Beginning  at  the  Point  of  Contact," 
Being  written  originally  in  the  interest  of 
better  educational  standards  in  the  Sunday- 
school  it  won  its  way  into  request  by  the 
primary  workers.     But  certain  secular  normal- 

V 


VI  PREFACE, 

school  teachers,  discovering  its  general  edu- 
cational utility,  quickly  appropriated  a  large 
part  of  the  edition. 

With  the  demand  for  republication  came 
the  suggestion  that  amplification  would  in- 
crease its  practical  value.  The  new  matter 
now  forms  so  considerable  a  part  of  the 
whole  as  to  render  the  present  manual  prac- 
tically a  new  work.  Numerous  illustrative 
examples  have  been  included,  showing  how 
the  principle  has  been  applied  in  dealing  with 
individual  pupils,  with  classes,  with  schools, 
and  even  with  peoples  in  more  or  less  primi- 
tive stages  of  life. 

The  dissertation  on  the  construction  of 
primary  Bible  courses  is  reserved  for  the  last 
chapter,  as  not  being  necessary  to  the  mere 
exposition  of  the  general  principle,  but  as  be- 
ing a  legitimate  outcome  and  illustration  of  it. 

Augmt^  1896. 


PREFACE  TO  FOURTH  EDITION 

Since  the  first  issue  of  "  The  Point  of 
Contact  in  Teaching,"  it  has  come  into  large 
use  by  various  classes  of  secular  as  well  as  re- 
ligious teachers,  no  less  than  by  writers  of 
Sunday-school  lesson  courses  and  lesson  helps. 
It  has  attracted  the  attention  of  kindergartners 
and  normal  schools,  and  has  gained  a  place  in 
at  least  one  divinity  school.  Like  all  key 
phrases  or  catchwords,  its  title  has  suffered 
some  deterioration  from  loose  use  or  over  use 
where  its  real  significance  has  not  been  per- 
fectly understood.  On  the  other  hand,  the 
author  has  found  the  title  adopted  and  rightly 
applied,  as  a  working  principle,  by  special 
teachers  and  students  among  whom  the  book 
was  scarcely  expected  to  circulate,  much  less 
to  prove  popular. 

It  therefore  seemed  best  to  thoroughly  re- 
vise the  book,  with  the  twofold  purpose  of 


Vlii  PREFACE    TO    FOURTH    EDITION. 

making  still  more  emphatic  and  clear  just 
what  the  "point  of  contact"  at  the  "plane 
of  experience  "  means,  and  of  illustrating  the 
universality  of  the  essential  principle  in  teach- 
ing or  reaching  all  sorts  and  conditions  ot  un- 
tutored minds,  from  the  innocent  child  in  our 
homes  and  primary  schools  to  the  barbarian 
of  the  mission  field. 

This  has  necessitated  considerable  change, 
both  by  excision  and  by  expansion.  Certain 
matters  of  temporary  interest  have  been 
eliminated  in  favor  of  those  aspects  of  the 
subject  which  are  of  permanent  and  universal 
import.  The  book  is  nevertheless  substan- 
tially the  same,  though  fuller  and  more  com- 
plete in  demonstration.  There  is  no  variance 
in  essential  purport  between  the  first  three 
editions  and  this  revision. 

Aprils  1900. 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 


I 

The  General  Principle     .         .         .       i 

II 

The  Plane  of  Experience  .         .     19 

III 
Applying  the  Principle     .         .         •     A7 

IV 

Missing  the  Point     .         ,         .         '83 

V 

The  Lesson  Material       .         ,         .  loi 


I 

THE  GENERAL  PRINCIPLE 


THE  GENERAL  PRINCIPLE 

*'  In  the  beginning  God  created  the  heaven 
and  the  earth," — but  for  me  he  created  them 
not  until  he  created  me.  Heaven  and  earth 
had  no  beginning,  so  far  as  I  am  concerned, 
until  my  powers  of  perceiving  them  had  their 
beginning.  So,  although  as  a  newborn  in- 
fant I  am  the  latest  act  of  God's  work  of 
creation,  my  experience,  my  contact  with 
life,  is  my  book  of  beginnings.  Heaven  and 
earth  start  into  existence  in  my  home,  my 
parents,  my  baby-rattle.  In  my  chronology, 
my  father's  gold  watch  precedes  the  sun,  a 
silver  dollar  antedates  the  moon,  and  my 
mother's  jewels  anticipate  the  stars.  My 
world  is  without  form,  and  void.  But  by 
this  I  mean  not  what  the  Bible  Book  of 
Genesis  means. 

Things  grad'iallv  assume  shape  as  I  per- 

3 


4  POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

ceive  their  relations,  and  come  to  know  them 
through  my  personal  experience.  The  sea- 
sons, you  say,  have  their  beginning  in  the 
movement  of  the  earth  around  the  sun,  but 
that  movement  has  its  beginning  for  me  in 
the  seasons.  The  light  of  day  has  its  real 
beginning  in  the  sun,  but  for  me  the  sun  has 
its  beginning  in  the  light  of  day.  My  infan- 
tile experience  is  my  infantile  book  of  begin- 
nings,— my  Genesis. 

That  u^hich  is  historically  first  may  be 
logically  last,  and  what  is  logically  first  may 
be  historically  last ;  or,  as  Aristotle  puts  it, 
"  that  which  is  first  as  cause  is  last  in  dis- 
covery." The  Creation  as  recorded  in  the 
Bible  comes  historically  before  my  birth ;  but 
logically  my  knowledge  of  the  sun  must  be- 
gin with  the  light  in  my  room,  my  study  of 
the  rock  strata  must  begin  with  the  stones 
in  the  garden  path ;  of  the  waters,  with  my 
morning  bath ;  of  the  animals,  with  my  pussy 
or  the  flies.  It  is  the  proximate  and  the  im- 
mediate rather  than  the  remote  and  the  final 
that  appeals  to  me  as  a  child. 


THE    GENERAL    PRINCIPLE.  5 

Not  only  do  these  illustrations  represent  a 
cardinal  principle  of  approach  to  the  little 
child's  mind,  but  to  a  large  extent  they  indi- 
cate the  only  royal  road  to  success,  the  "  line 
of  least  resistance "  in  dealing  with  those 
primitive  and  untutored  peoples  who  are  in- 
fants in  knowledge  of  any  kind. 

Nothing  is  so  truly  known  as  that  which  is 
known  through  a  self-active  personal  ex- 
perience. "  Know  that  thou  hast  no  knowl- 
edge but  what  thou  hast  got  by  working," 
says  Carlyle.  Therefore  it  is  at  a  point  in 
this  £xperiential  knowing  that  we  can  begin 
to  instruct  the  child  to  the  best  advantage. 
Indeed,  it  is  only  where  we  touch  his  life  in- 
terests that  we  can  be  said  to  instruct  him  at 
all.  It  is  doubtful  whether,  strictly  speak- 
ing, we  can  even  be  said  to  create  interests  in 
others.  As  Miss  Harriet  M.  Scott  startlingly 
says,  "The  most  we  can  do  is  to  expand  or 
enrich  an  already  existent  interest."  This 
point  in  life  interests  or  experiences  I  call  the 
Point  of  Contact,  because  it  is  the  point  at 
which  the  child's   experience   and  the  lesson 


6  POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

he  is  to  learn  can  be  brought  into  contact 
with  each  other, — or,  better,  the  one  evolved 
from  the  other.  Starting  with  something 
which  the  child  knows  through  experience, 
and  is  therefore  personally  interested  in,  the 
subject  is  thenceforth  to  be  progressively  de- 
veloped. If  this  development  of  new  truth 
is  really  a  legitimate  unfolding,  a  "  natural 
development  of  his  own  interests,  it  is  his 
own,  it  is  really  himself." 

We  must  begin  where  we  find  the  child, — 
as  Colonel  Parker  puts  it.  The  only  place 
where  we  can  be  sure  to  find  him  is  at  some 
point  on  the  plane  of  a  child's  natural  experi- 
ences or  contact  with  life.  It  is  of  no  use  to 
start  with  an  abstract  statement,  motto,  text 
or  doctrine  of  any  kind.  Every  one  must  do 
his  own  abstracting.  Out  of  the  concrete, 
objective  experiences  of  life  only  can  we  de- 
duce or  generalize  our  abstractions  of  knowl- 
edge. An  experience  may  be  non-sensuous, 
internal, — emotional,  or  spiritual,  it  is  true, 
— but  with  this  we  have  comparatively  little 
to  do  in  our  first  approach  to  the  child  mind. 


THE    GENERAL    PRINCIPLE.  "] 

It  is  at  the  point  of  the  child's  sense  contact 
with  the  external  world  that  the  opportunity 
for  our  best  appeal  to  him  lies.  All  imagery 
must  be  made  of  the  raw  material  furnished 
by    the    sense    perception.^     And    be    it    re- 

'  Pestalozzi  says :  "  The  starting-point  of  thought  is 
sense  impression, — the  direct  impression,  that  is,  pro- 
duced by  the  world  on  our  internal  and  external  senses. 
...  It  is  life  that  educates."  This  is  altogether  a  dif- 
ferent thing  from  addressing  our  primary  instruction  to 
sense  perception  as  such.  As  Dr.  William  T.  Harris 
says :  "  Thought  deals  with  the  dynamic  element  of  ex- 
perience rather  than  with  mere  things,  which  are  only 
static  results."  We  are  quite  on  the  child's  plane  of  ex- 
perience when  we  address  his  sense  of  wonder,  curiosity, 
love,  or  fear.  But  we  know  less  of  those  points  in  his 
experience,  and  cannot  often  be  so  sure  that  we  are 
making  a  close  contact  with  his  real  experiential  life  as 
we  can  when  we  seek  a  point  of  departure  in  his  obvious 
natural  experience  with  the  external  world.  Notwith- 
standing the  great  differences  between  Pestalozzi  and 
Froebel  this  principle  is  not  essentially  at  variance  with 
either.  It  is  true  that  Miss  Blow  sharply  contrasts  these 
two  greatest  masters  as  to  their  pivotal  ideas  when  she 
says :  "  Pestalozzi  claims  that  the  centre  from  which 
education  radiates  is  sense  perception  {Atisc/iauutig). 
Froebel  claims  that  this  centre  is  Gendith,  a  word  ex- 
plained by  Hegel  to  mean  the  '  undeveloped,  indefinite 


8  POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

membered  here  that,  as  Professor  Dewey  says, 
"  the  image  is  the  great  instrument  of  instruc- 
tion. What  a  child  gets  out  of  any  subject 
presented  to  him  is  simply  the  images  which 
he  himself  forms  with  regard  to  it." 

What  Miss  Blow  calls  the  "  point  of  de- 
parture "  is  simply  the  starting-point  in  the 
teaching  process ;  but  this  point  of  departure 
must  be  at  the  child's  point  of  contact  with 
experiential  life.  In  looking  for  this  point 
let  us  not  forget  the  words  of  Rousseau : 
"  Childhood  has  ways  of  seeing,  thinking, 
feeling,  peculiar  to  itself;  nothing  is  more 
absurd  than  to  wish  to  substitute  ours  in  their 
place." 

The  idea  of  the  relative  value  of  possible 

totality  of  spiritual  being.'  We  may  approximately 
translate  Gemiith  by  '  heart,'  and  affirm  that  with  Froebel 
the  pivot  upon  which  true  education  turns  is  the  regener. 
ation  of  the  affections."  But  it  is  also  true  that  in 
Froebel's  mother-play  "  the  point  of  departure  is  usually 
some  actual  experience  of  the  children."  However, 
there  is  no  intention  of  entering  here  upon  a  philo- 
sophical discussion,  but  merely  to  point  out  a  practical 
way  of  approach  to  and  procedure  with  the  child  mind. 


THE    GENERAL    PRINCIPLE.  9 

Starting-points  for  the  child's  development  as 
determined  by  their  closeness  or  familiarity  to 
the  child  through  his  own  experience,  is  well 
illustrated  in  a  discussion  between  Miss 
Youmans  and  Dr.  Mary  P.  Jacobi  in  the 
matter  of  teaching  botany  to  children.  The 
noticeable  thing  is  that  the  child  is  to  ap- 
proach the  science  in  a  direction  opposite  to, 
or  at  least  different  from,  that  from  which  the 
mature  scientist  approaches  it.  For  the  child, 
that  point  of  the  plant's  life  which  is  out  of 
sight,  underground,  is  logically,  or  peda- 
gogically,  late,  although  in  the  plant's  history 
it  is  first. 

An  article  on  "  The  Scientific  Method 
with  Children  "  in  The  Popular  Science 
Monthly,  by  Henry  Lincoln  Clapp,  says 
rhildren  "  have  their  own  starting-points,  and 
these  should  be  taken  by  the  teacher.  .  .  . 
Dr.  Jacobi  would  use  the  flower,  in  beginning 
to  teach  children  botany,  because  it  is  the 
most  attractive,  makes  the  largest  impression 
upon  the  senses,  is  easy  of  apprehension,  and 
leads   to   the   appreciation   of  specific  differ- 


10         POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

ences.  .  .  .  Miss  Youmans  would  begin  with 
the  leaf,  on  the  assumption  that  it  is  simpler 
than  the  flower,  and,  in  tracing  its  scientific 
relations,  deeper  intellectual  pleasure  is  re- 
ceived. .  .  .  Beginning  with  roots,  as  so 
many  systematic  teachers  have  done,  and  fol- 
lowing with  stem,  leaves,  flowers,  and  ending 
with  fruits  as  the  ultimate  work  of  the  plant, 
although  logical  to  adults,  full  of  regular 
sequences,  and  scientific  from  one  stand- 
point, is  unscientific  from  another. 

"  Children  do  not  start  to  work  with  plants 
in  that  way  unless  they  are  obliged  to,  but  in 
a  way  diametrically  opposite, — attractive 
flowers  and  fruits  first,  and  unattractive  roots 
last.  It  is  certainly  natural,  although  it  may 
be  heathenish,  and  show  their  natural  de- 
pravity, for  them  to  do  so.  .  .  .  An  exten- 
sive use  of  imported  material  is  directly  op- 
posed to  Agassiz's  injunction  to  use  the 
material  nearest  at  hand.  Moreover,  it  is 
worth  while  to  remember  that  materials  and 
methods  which  are  serviceable  enough  in 
teaching  adults  often  become  forced  and  me- 


THE    GFNERAL    PRINCIPLE.  II 

chanical  in  teaching  children.  It  should  not 
be  taken  for  granted  that  the  teacher's  se- 
quences, laboriously  studied  out,  .  .  .  are  the 
pupil's  sequences,  or  that  he  can  assimilate 
them." 

Now  the  great  fault  in  our  religious  teach- 
ing of  the  child  has  been  that  we  have  not 
sought  his  most  penetrable  point.  Our  ap- 
proach to  him  has  been  through  adult  ideas, 
upon  an  adult  plane,  complicated  with  con- 
ventionality, institutionalism,  and  abstrac- 
tions. We  have  not  sufficiently  regarded  the 
plane  of  his  experience  as  the  essential  way 
of  approach  to  him.  Observe,  I  do  not  lo- 
cate this  plane  as  either  high  or  low;  it  is 
neither,  and  it  is  both,  according  to  what 
your  terms  mean.  It  is  in  some  ways  higher 
than  ours,  in  some  ways  lower.  Let  that 
pass. 

We  have  stood  upon  our  adult  plane  of 
complex  thought  and  conventionality  to 
manipulate  the  little  child's  current  of  thought 
running  on  a  very  different  plane.  True,  wc 
have   spoken   baby-talk   to   him,  but   in   that 


12         POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

baby-language  we  have  spoken  to  him  truths 
unsuited  to  babies,  and  because  he  was 
seemingly  entertained  with  our  antics  we  sup- 
posed that  we  succeeded  in  our  effort  to  make 
an  adult  baby  of  him.  Our  Lord  did  not 
teach  in  that  way.  See  how  he  made  the 
people  think  by  finding  their  point  of  contact 
with  their  common  occupations  and  surround- 
ings, and  proceeding  from  this  starting-point  to 
whatever  truth  he  had  in  view  for  them. 
Like  him,  we  must  address  pupils  on  the 
level  of  their  experiential  life. 

We  have  made  too  much,  for  instance,  of 
time  sequences.  The  young  child  has  a  very 
inadequate  conception  of  chronology.  History 
as  history — a  record  of  impersonal,  or  intri- 
cately related  events,  of  remote  causes  and  ef- 
fects— is  wholly  out  of  his  plane.  His  se- 
quences are  of  a  different  sort.  So,  too,  we 
have  made  too  much  of  points  of  doctrine 
and  forms  of  theological  reasoning,  and  of  an 
objective  life  utterly  foreign  and  remote  from 
child  experience.  A  writer  in  The  Church 
Standard,  C.  E.  Hutchison,  says:  "We  have 


THE    GENERAL    PRINCIPLE.  I3 

lessons  in  the  Catechism  crammed  with  words 
over  which  grown  people  have  been  fighting 
for  centuries,  and  about  which  they  do  not 
yet  agree.  And  there  are  laborious  series  on 
the  Bible,  full  of  information  about  the 
structure  of  Jewish  houses,  the  order  of  serv- 
ice in  the  synagogue,  suggestions  for  special 
investigation,  and  the  like."  The  child's 
plane,  on  the  contrary,  is  level  only  to  the 
activities  and  appreciations  of  immediate  life. 

Leaders  in  educational  and  pedagogical 
thought  have  long  seen  the  radical  defect  in 
our  Sunday-school,  as  indeed  in  all  our  re- 
ligious instruction  of  the  little  children.  The 
Sunday-school  has  been  severely  criticised  as 
an  educational  institution.  Notwithstanding 
the  truth  in  such  criticism  we  know  the  Sun- 
day-school to  be  one  of  the  grandest  and  most 
aggressive  of  Christian  institutions.  But  we 
ought  not  to  be  above  learning  from  our 
critics.  An  article  some  years  ago  in  The 
Westminster  Review  gives  forth  no  uncertain 
sound,  thus : 

"  Theology  should  not  be  forced  upon  the 


14    POINT  OF  CONTACT  IN  TEACHING. 

child's  mind  at  a  very  early  age.  ...  A 
child's  first  idea  of  spiritual  things,  if  these 
are  presented  to  him  in  the  phraseology 
usually  employed  for  the  purpose,  is  neces- 
sarily a  false  one,  made  so  by  his  natural  sub- 
stitution of  the  concrete  for  the  abstract. 
This  fact  often  receives  practical  confirma- 
tion from  the  quaint  notions  children  are 
found  to  have  formed  about  religion ;  the  ab- 
surdity of  the  questions  to  which  these  notions 
give  rise  is  a  frequent  cause  of  amusement  to 
their  elders,  but  it  none  the  less  furnishes  con- 
clusive evidence  of  the  confusion  that  prevails 
in  many  little  minds.  Premature  instruction 
relating  to  the  spiritual  side  of  religion  thus 
leads  the  child  into  errors  which  have  to  be 
corrected  by  subsequent  experience,  and  the 
false  ideas  resulting  from  it  form  an  unde- 
sirable starting-point  in  religious  instruction." 
Where,  then,  will  the  desirable  starting- 
point  be  found  ?  In  the  general  range  or  on 
the  plane  of  characteristic  childhood  experiences^ 
and  especially  those  which  arise  from  the  child's 
immediate  contact  with  the  external  world.     Out 


THE    GENERAL    PRINCIPLE.  I5 

of  the  child's  own  self-active  life  must  come 
that  which  makes  knowledge  power — or,  bet- 
ter, which  transmutes  mere  instruction  or  in- 
formation into  personal  efficiency.  Life  is 
the  great  interpreter  and  educator. 

Here  let  it  be  said,  once  for  all,  that  in  this 
manual  "  the  child "  usually  means  a  child 
under  eight  years  of  age.  Years  do  not  regu- 
late everything,  but  they  do  regulate  some 
things.  Span  of  time  is  an  essential  to  the 
reaching  of  a  certain  plane  of  experience,  a 
certain  sight-level,  a  grade  of  development. 
A  forced  cultivation  of  brain  cells,  natural 
precocity  or  intelligence,  will  never  put  a 
child  just  where  an  accumulation  of  con- 
scious years  will.  A  child  or  a  man  may  be 
such  a  prodigy  in  arithmetic  as  to  make  gi- 
gantic calculations  in  a  moment  of  time.  He 
may  have  such  a  phenomenal  memory  that  he 
can  repeat  verbatim  the  contents  of  a  news- 
paper after  one  reading.  He  may  have 
powers  like  these,  and  yet  be  dependent  on 
common  experience  for  just  that  development 
which  such  experience  alone  can  bring.     He 


1 6         POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

must  have  a  sense  of  the  process  of  time,  or 
of  conscious  intervals,  behind  him,  in  order  to 
have  a  definite  historic  consciousness.  And 
the  younger  the  child  the  more  applicable  is 
this  truth  of  child  nature. 

In  his  outlook  and  in  his  general  mental 
method  a  child  of  six  is  farther  from  a  child 
of  ten  or  twelve  than  a  child  of  twelve  is 
from  a  young  man  of  twenty.  A  child  of 
six  and  a  normal  child  of  nine  should  not  be 
in  a  class  together. 

The  general  principle,  then,  is,  that  in  the 
child's  instruction  we  must  begin  at  his  point 
of  contact  with  objective  or  external  life  as 
he  sees  it.  Life,  it  is  true,  includes  the  inner 
experiences, — appetites,  desires,  affections, 
etc. — as  well  as  those  which  are  sensory  and 
peripheral.  But  it  is  in  the  region  of  the 
latter,  it  is  upon  the  plane  of  those  experi- 
ences which  he  gets  in  his  sense  contact  with 
the  external  world,  that  we  must  usually 
start  with  him.  The  inner  life  of  intentions, 
emotions,  affections,  appreciations,  must  not 
be  turned  back  on   itself  for   objective   con- 


THE    GENERAL    PRINCIPLE.  I7 

templation.  A  child  loves,  fears,  hates,  en- 
joys ;  but  he  does  not  mentally  handle  enjoy- 
ment, hatred,  fear,  or  love,  objectively.  The 
child's  prime  interest  is  in  the  concrete  ob- 
ject of  sense.  This  is  well  illustrated  by  the 
study  of  children's  letters.  I  quote  from  an 
article  on  this  subject  in  The  (London) 
Spectator  (September  23,  1893).  The  writer 
says : 


"  Children's  letters  are  always  concrete.  They  write 
about  what  they  are  doing,  not  about  what  they  are 
thinking,  and  at  greater  length  about  the  achievements 
of  other  people  and  animals  than  about  their  own. 
Looking  through  a  pile  of  old  letters  from  children, 
mostly  girls  of  all  ages,  from  four  to  thirteen,  the  writer 
finds  nearly  three-quarters  devoted  to  careful  accounts  of 
cats,  dogs,  tame  mice,  a  donkey,  '  Joey,'  a  '  ginipig,' 
'  rabits,'  chickens,  goats,  and  innumerable  pigeons. 
There  is  hardly  a  word  about  themselves  or  their  feelings 
in  the  whole  collection,  though  the  health,  wants,  and 
probable  sentiments  of  the  animals  are  treated  at  great 
length  and  with  every  diversity  of  spelling.  Lists  of 
*  what  the  pigeons  have  got,'  such  as  '  the  fantail,  two 
babies  and  one  egg ;  the  Jocobin,  two  eggs,'  and  so  on, 
are  followed  by  other  lists  of  •  ones  that  have  got  no- 
body.'" 


1 8         POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

That  the  child's  experiences  are  concrete 
rather  than  abstract,  simple  rather  than  com- 
plex, immediate  rather  than  remote,  will  be 
more  fully  illustrated  in  the  next  chapter. 


II 

THE  PLANE  OF  EXPERIENCE 


II 

THE  PLANE  OF  EXPERIENCE 

As  a  practical  matter,  the  point  of  entry  to 
any  child's  mind  depends  upon  the  indi- 
viduality of  his  life ;  but  in  dealing  with 
classes  we  must  make  sacrifices  of  the  in- 
dividual for  the  many.  Of  course  we  lose  in 
effectiveness  by  this,  and,  so  far,  the  single 
pupil  is  the  ideal  class.  But,  on  the  con- 
trary, the  single  pupil  loses  the  advantage  of 
the  social  relation.  All  class  teaching  is 
therefore  a  compromise  process. 

We  can  appeal  to  childhood  from  the  gen- 
eral plane  or  ordinary  range  of  experiences 
most  characteristic  of  childhood.  Says  H. 
Courthope  Bowen,  "What  interests  a  child 
must  be  immediate  and  level  to  his  thoughts. 
He  cannot  realize  a  far-off  advantage  ;  or,  at 
any  rate,  he  cannot  feel  it  for  long.  Young 
and  old,  we  all  experience  delight  in  discover- 

21 


22         POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

ing,  or  in  being  helped  to  see,  connections 
between  isolated  facts, — especially  such  as  we 
have  ourselves  picked  up." 

Manifestly  the  plane  of  experience,  the 
germination  of  interest,  the  genesis  of  study, 
will  be  a  simple,  rather  than  a  complex,  con- 
crete rather  than  abstract.  As  Lange  says, 
"  the  numerous  concrete,  fresh,  and  strong 
ideas  gained  in  earliest  youth  are  the  best 
helps  to  apperception  for  all  subsequent  learn- 
ing." But  these  germinal  ideas  have  no  af- 
filiation with  the  "regular  sequences"  of 
theology  ;  they  will  not  be  found  in  the  local, 
political,  or  religious  issues,  or  the  imagery 
of  Ezekiel,  Haggai,  Zechariah,  Nehemiah, 
Nahum,  Micah,  or  Habakkuk,  or  the  com- 
plex rituals  and  regulations  of  the  A4osaic 
era.  Supposing  "the  elders  of  the  Jews" 
did  build  and  prosper  "  through  the  prophe- 
sying of  Haggai  the  prophet  and  Zechariah 
the  son  of  Iddo," — what  is  that  to  a  babe 
who  has  no  conception  of  space,  time,  organ- 
ized society,  or  even  of  our  commonest  adult 
conventionalities  ?      How  near    are  the  Ten 


THE    PLANE    OF    EXPERIENCE.  23 

Commandments  to  the  plane  of  experience  of 
a  child  who  cannot  count  up  to  ten — nor 
above  four  ? 

Nor  is  there  experimental  contact  in  such 
a  "golden  text"  as  "The  Lord  thy  God 
will  turn  thy  captivity,  and  have  compassion 
upon  thee;"  nor  in  "We  made  our  prayer 
unto  our  God,  and  set  a  watch  against  them." 
Even  for  such  a  text  as  "  The  preaching  of 
the  cross  is  to  them  that  perish  foolishness, 
but  unto  us  which  are  saved  it  is  the  power 
of  God,"  one  requires  considerable  prior 
knowledge  before  it  can  be  assimilated  into 
the  life  and  become  formative  of  character. 
To  force  these  on  the  child  is  what  that  re- 
markable teacher,  Thring  of  Uppingham, 
would  call  "  an  effort  to  pour  into  a  reluctant 
mind  some  unintelligible  bit  of  cipher  knowl- 
edge and  to  cork  it  down  by  punishment.  It 
disagrees,  it  ferments,  the  cork  flies  out,  the 
noxious  stuff  is  spilt ;  whilst  the  taskmaster 
believes  it  is  all  right  because  of  the  trouble 
he  took  to  get  it  in." 

Deliberately  to  select  a  Scripture   portion 


24        POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

SO  remote  from  the  plane  of  experience  of 
little  children,  and  then  suppose  that,  because 
it  is  God's  Word,  God  will  work  a  miracle 
in  order  that  they  may  understand  it,  seems 
hardly  less  than  presumptuous  mockery.  The 
responsibility  is  upon  us  to  see  that  truths  are 
presented  to  the  children  in  an  order  consist- 
ent with  their  capability  to  receive  those 
truths  through  experiential  beginnings.  And 
this  is  not  to  be  done  by  paraphernalia,  or  by 
parrot  verbal  memorizing,  or  by  the  awaken- 
ing of  a  pseudo  attention  through  mere  spec- 
tacular exhibits  of  hearts,  ladders,  crosses, 
crowns,  and  blackboard  intricacies  which 
might  make  an  adult  dizzy  if  they  did  not  be- 
wilder children. 

Take  this  text,  which,  before  now,  has 
been  given  to  little  children  :  "Giving  thanks 
unto  the  Father,  which  hath  made  us  meet  to 
be  partakers  of  the  inheritance  of  the  saints 
in  light."  How  absurd  to  attempt  to  force  a 
conception  here  !  Let  us  not  decei\e  our- 
selves into  thinking  that  such  memorizings 
have  a  future  value.     Says  Froebel :   "At  a 


THE    PLANE    OF    EXPERIENCE.  25 

later  period  of  life,  when  comprehension  at- 
taches a  sense  to  the  sound,  the  senseless  word 
will  be  the  more  injurious." 

To  say  that  a  child  has  enjoyed  committing 
to  memory — or  any  other  task,  for  that  mat- 
ter— proves  little.  Nothing  is  more  seductive 
to  the  teacher  than  the  child's  enjoyment  or 
delight  in  his  task.  Not  that  he  should  not 
delight  in  it,  but  the  delight  may  entirely 
mislead  us  as  to  its  cause.  "  It  is  possible," 
says  President  G.  Stanley  Hall,  "  that  the 
present  shall  be  so  attractive  and  preoccupy- 
ing that  the  child  never  once  sends  his 
thoughts  to  the  remote  in  time  and  place." 
This  "present"  may  be  mere  verbal  jingle, 
it  may  be  the  artificial  paraphernalia  of  the 
primary  room,  or  anything  but  the  concept 
which  the  adult  observer  is  laboring  to  lodge 
in  a  mind  impenetrable  to  it. 

The  points  of  contact  of  most  children 
with  the  worlds  of  matter  and  of  thought  are 
at  once  numerous  and  few.  Investigations 
conducted  under  the  direction  of  President 
Hall  upon  large  numbers  of  Boston  school- 


26        POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

children,  just  after  they  had  entered  the  low- 
est grade  of  the  primary  school,  say  six  years 
old,  revealed  that  35  per  cent,  had  never  seen 
the  country,  20  per  cent,  did  not  know  where 
milk  came  from,  55  per  cent,  did  not  know 
that  wooden  things  were  made  from  trees,  47 
per  cent,  never  saw  a  pig,  from  13  to  18  per 
cent,  did  not  know  where  their  cheek,  fore- 
head, or  throat  was,  and  fewer  yet  knew 
elbow,  wrist,  ribs,  etc.  More  than  three- 
fourths  of  the  children  had  never  seen,  to 
know  them,  any  of  the  common  cereals, 
trees,  or  vegetables,  growing.  These  facts 
indicate  how  slenderly  furnished  the  child's 
mind  is  for  a  discussion  involving  theologies, 
chronologies,  successive  wars,  political  com- 
plications, Judaizing  tendencies,  obscure  im- 
ageries and  prophetic  references,  ancient  ritual 
usages,  tribal  dissensions,  and  the  like. 

President  Hall  well  asks,  "  What  idea  can 
the  18  per  cent,  of  children  who  thought  a 
cow  no  larger  than  its  picture,  get  from  all 
instruction  about  hide,  horns,  milk  ?  "  This 
is  a  pertinent  question,  mutatis  mutandis^  for 


THE    PLANE    OF    EXPERIENCE.  I"] 

whoever  is  to  make  lesson-courses  for  our 
primary  Sunday-schools,  even  more  than  for 
those  who  are  to  teach  them.  To  tell  the 
average  six-year  old  that  "  the  price  of  a 
virtuous  woman  is  far  above  rubies,"  simple 
as  it  sounds  to  us,  presupposes  an  experience 
in  the  matter  of  relative  values,  of  precious 
stones,  of  marketable  abstractions.  Is  this  any 
better  than  teaching  about  the  unknown  cow 
by  an  account  of  unknown  horns,  hide,  etc.  ? 

In  the  same  line  of  revelation  as  Dr. 
Hall's,  Superintendent  O.  J.  Laylander  pro- 
pounded such  plain  questions  as  "  Why 
should  we  do  good  ?  "  "  What  is  Sunday 
for?"  "Where  is  heaven?"  "What  do 
children  do  in  heaven  ?  "  "  What  do  the 
angels  do  ?  "  to  children  varying  from  six  to 
ten  years.  Here  are  a  few  specimen  answers. 
"  Angels  wear  plain  white  clothes,  and  don't 
look  stylish."  "  Have  nice  hair  and  wear 
nice  gowns."  "  Angels  come  down  and  tell 
men  when  they  burn  sheep  what  to  do." 

Other  answers,  about  the  Divine  appear- 
ance, etc.,  while  they  are  net  irreverent,  seem 


28         POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

almost  shocking  to  us,  and  need  not  be  repeated 
here  ;  it  is  natural  for  the  child  to  be  concrete 
and  direct.  One  does  not  have  to  look  far  to 
discover  the  sensuous  origin  of  most,  if  not 
all,  of  these  answers, — perhaps  not  outside 
of  some  of  our  homes  and  Sunday-schools. 
Some  of  them  are  at  least  a  serious  reflection 
on  the  advisability  of  displaying  crude  chro- 
mes or  any  other  form  of  portraiture  of  our 
Lord.  It  is  indeed  a  question  how  far  the 
picturing  of  spirit  is  advisable.  To  the  child's 
imagination  such  a  draught  is  more  likely  to 
be  narcotic  than  stimulating.  It  is  often 
better  that  a  hero  be  left  unpictured  or  unseen. 
It  is  easy  to  see  that  the  ideally  exact  point 
of  departure  or  genesis  of  a  child's  education 
in  any  sphere  is  an  experience,  or  contact 
with  the  world,  peculiar  to  that  child.  For 
a  certain  little  girl's  recitation  from  Long- 
fellow I  chose  a  part  of  the  potter's  song  in 
"  Keramos  " — with  great  success.  But  this 
was  largely  because  she  had  visited  a  potter)', 
and  had  come  into  actual  sense  contact  with, 
and  so  acquired  an  interest  in,  the  processes 


THE    PLANE    OF    EXPERIENCE.  29 

of  the  potter's  wheel.  And  yet  she  was  not 
a  potter's  daughter  and  in  two  or  three  years 
her  recollection  of  the  visit  to  the  pottery  be- 
came dim — and  with  it  her  remembrance  of 
the  poem  also  faded.  The  potter's  wheel  was 
not  strictly  in  the  plane  of  her  experience 
even  though  she  had  been  once  in  her  life  an 
interested  spectator  of  it.  Yet,  if  a  recitation 
from  Longfellow  must  be  made,  this  was  the 
best  approach  to  a  point  of  contact  with  her 
life  that  was  available.  Does  not  much  of 
our  scriptural  teaching  similarly  die  out  be- 
cause it  has  been  fundamentally  inapt  to  the 
child's  plane  of  ordinary  experience  ? 

The  more  closely  anything  lies  to  our  per- 
sonal experience,  and  the  nearer  it  is  to  the 
level  of  our  ordinary  vision,  the  more  easily 
do  we  become  interested  in  it,  and  the  better 
starting-point  is  it,  therefore,  from  which  to 
follow  a  line  of  thought.  This  is  not  pecul- 
iar to  the  child,  but  is  common  to  all.  The 
range  of  experience  is  much  more  extensive 
in  the  adult  than  in  the  child.  Every  one 
knows  that,  when  he  has  been  through  a  par- 


30        POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

ticular  form  of  experience,  he  has  always  a 
peculiar  interest  in  others  who  are  passing 
through  that  same  experience.  A  person  who 
has  been  rescued  from  a  burning  building  in 
the  middle  of  the  night  will  run  to  the  win- 
dow to  see  the  fire  department  go  by,  when, 
previously  to  his  rescue,  he  would  have  paid 
very  little  attention  to  it.  A  person  who  has 
contracted  what  he  supposes  to  be  an  unusual 
disease  is  surprised  to  discover  many  other 
persons  who  have  been,  or  are,  afflicted  in 
the  same  way. 

Let  me  illustrate  now  a  little  more  particu- 
larly this  matter  of  the  plane  of  experience, 
or  levels  of  sight,  or  points  of  view. 

My  friend  Mrs.  B.,  after  the  lawn  was 
mowed,  quoted  to  her  husband,  "  He  shall 
come  down  like  rain  upon  the  mown  grass " 
(Ps.  Ixxii.  6).  Mr.  B.,  who  had  been  brought 
up  on  a  farm,  and  was  accustomed  to  regard 
rain  upon  grass  which  was  drying  into  hay  as 
deleterious,  never  was  able  to  get  any  spir- 
itual use  out  of  this  text.  His  point  of  con- 
tact was  with  his  experience  as  a  haymaker. 


THE    PLANE    OF    EXPERIENCE.  3I 

Mrs.  B.'s  was  with  her  experience  as  a  lawn- 
keeper.  Consequently  they  had  not  inter- 
preted the  verse  in  the  same  way.  One  had 
applied  it  to  the  grass  that  was  cut  off  for 
hay ;  the  other,  to  the  remaining  grass  from 
which  the  hay  had  been  cut.  In  each  case 
life  was  the  interpreter  and  educator. 

Again,  an  intelligent  and  studious  child  in 
her  ninth  year  was,  with  her  father's  assis- 
tance, studying  the  Sunday-school  lesson  on 
"  The  Cities  of  Refuge."  She  had  never  heard 
the  word  "refuge,"  and  her  father  explained, 
as  well  as  he  could,  first  what  the  idea  of 
refuge  is,  and  then  what  a  city  of  refuge  was. 
She  went  to  Sunday-school,  and  the  teacher, 
in  order  to  vivify  the  lesson,  told  a  dreadful 
story  of  the  torture  which  some  boys  had 
inflicted  upon  a  companion.  The  child  was 
so  shocked  by  the  horror  that  it  was  some 
time  before  it  lost  its  hold  on  her  nerves. 
The  idea  of  the  city  of  refuge  seemed  to 
have  made  no  impression  on  her  at  all,  al- 
though it  was,  of  course,  explained  to  her  a 
second  time  in  the  class. 


32        POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

Six  months  later  she  visited  the  old  fort  at 
St.  Augustine.  It  was  altogether  a  different 
sort  of  thing  from  what  she  supposed  a  fort 
to  be.  In  discussing  it  with  her  father,  the 
various  wars  in  which  it  had  played  a  part 
were  spoken  of,  and  then  the  father  said  that 
it  had  done  great  service  as  a  place  of  refuge 
for  the  inhabitants  of  the  adjacent  town  dur- 
ing an  attack  by  the  Indians.  The  child  im- 
mediately asked,  "  What  is  a  refuge  ?  "  The 
explanations  of  the  term  which  she  had  re- 
ceived a  half-year  before  had  gone  for  noth- 
ing. The  father  tried  to  recall  the  Bible  les- 
son of  the  previous  term,  but  to  little  purpose. 
Refuges,  as  such,  had  not  come  within  the 
plane  of  her  experience  until  now,  and  hence 
the  definition  of  them,  and  the  lesson  upon 
them,  amounted  to  little.  There  had  been 
no  experiential  life  to  act  as  interpreter.  The 
explanation  had  to  be  made  over  again  with 
the  object  in  actual  view,  the  father  recalling 
the  lesson  on  the  cities  of  refuge  and  so  es- 
tablishing a  life  connection. 

Now  let  •**  look  at  the  plane  of  experience 


THE    PLANE    OF    EXPERIENCE.  33 

in  this  case,  and  the  relative  degrees  of  im- 
mediateness  to,  or  remoteness  from,  the  child's 
circumstantial  interest.  Being  herself  a  tem- 
porary inhabitant  of  the  town  as  a  visitor,  the 
flight  of  the  inhabitants  to  the  fort  for  refuge 
came  closely  within  the  range  of  her  imagina- 
tion— or  fancied  experience.  It  is  true  she 
had  never  experienced  such  an  event  as  a 
flight  for  life,  but  she  was  close  enough  to 
the  conditions  to  be  able — by  raising  herself, 
through  her  imagination,  on  her  tiptoes, 
metaphorically — to  come  fairly  within  sight 
of  the  experience  of  a  refugee. 

Again,  suppose  she  had  actually  been  her- 
self a  refugee  from  the  Indians  in  a  place  of 
safety.  The  idea  of  the  fort  as  a  place  of 
refuge  would  have  been  far  more  vivid,  more 
intensely  real.  In  either  case  there  was  an 
excellent  point  of  contact  with  experience 
from  which  to  teach  the  idea  of  refuge  in 
time  of  danger.  But  in  one  case  the  contact 
would  have  been  closer  than  in  the  other.  In 
one  instance,  she  had  sufficient  sensory 
knowledge  of  the  place  to  imagine  the  ex- 


34   POINT  OF  CONTACT  IN  TEACHING. 

perience  with  fair  correctness  ;  in  the  other, 
she  would  have  had  an  actual  experience. 
But  without  some  such  basis  any  instruction 
would  have  conveyed  little  impression.  In 
the  Sunday-school  class  the  city  of  refuge  had 
no  basis  whatever  in  life  experience,  and  what 
the  imagination  could  do,  therefore,  was  so 
weak  that  it  soon  dropped  out  of  her  mental 
furniture. 

Let  us  now  take  another  case  showing  a 
conscious  resistance  of  the  child  to  the  at- 
tempt to  force  upon  him  truths  of  nature  by 
bringing  them  wrong  end  foremost  or  foreign 
to  his  experiential  plane.  I  condense  and 
quote  from  an  article  by  Mrs.  Mary  C.  Cut- 
ler in  The  Sunday  School  Times.  She  tells 
of  an  enthusiastic  high-school  girl  who,  hav- 
ing become  interested  in  geology,  decided  to 
use  her  knowledge  as  the  basis  of  bedtime 
tales  for  her  little  brother. 

"  Wouldn't  Kobliie  like  to  have  each  night  a  part  of  a 
great,  long  story,  all  about  how  the  earth  was  made?" 
she  asked  one  evening  soon  afterward. 

"  P'raps    so,"    he    answered,    somewhat    doubtfully. 


THE    PLANE    OF    EXPERIENCE-.  35 

"  Will  you  tell  how  the  sidewalks  weie  made  ? "  he 
added,  seeming  a  little  more  interested. 

"  Oh,  yes  !  "  replied  his  sister  ;  "  only  we  want  to 
know  first  how  the  ground  was  made  to  lay  the  side- 
walks on." 

And  so  the  story  had  gone  on  night  after  night,  while 
Robbie  had  shown  varying  degrees  of  interest,  but  never 
quite  so  much  as  his  sister  had  expected.  She  tried  her 
best  to  adapt  the  story  to  his  comprehension,  and  some- 
times felt  much  encouraged ;  as  when  she  was  telling 
about  the  formation  of  the  coal-beds,  and  showed  him  a 
piece  of  coal  she  had  found,  which  seemed  to  have 
markings  on  it  like  the  bark  of  a  tree ;  or,  at  another 
time,  when  she  showed  him  a  picture  of  the  huge  bird- 
tracks  that  had  been  found  in  other  formations. 

But  now  and  then  Robbie  would  ask  some  question 
about  the  sidewalks,  showing  that  his  interest  was  cen- 
tred on  that  with  which  he  had  first  become  acquainted 
in  experience.  The  sidewalks  were  his  "  point  of  con- 
tact "  with,  and  his  first  interest  in,  earth  structure.  It 
was  because  he  hoped  to  learn  some  time  how  the  side- 
walks were  made,  that  he  was  trying  to  listen  patiently 
to  all  the  rest  of  the  story. 

And  so  on  this  night  Rol:)bie  settled  himself  down  in 
his  corner  of  the  chair,  and  was  very  quiet.  He  asked 
his  sister  no  more  questions.  For  the  first  time  his  eyes 
began  to  droop  before  she  had  finished. 

"  I  must  try  to  make  it  more  interesting,"  she  said  to 
herself  as  she  kissed  him  good-night.  .  .  . 

Years   afterward,  when  our   school-girl    had    grown 


36        POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

older  and  wiser,  she  learned  how  abnormal,  as  well  as 
unsatisfying,  had  been  her  method, — that  she  ought  to 
have  begun  with  what  the  child  already  knew  something 
about,  and  was  interested  in,  and  thence  she  could  have 
led  him  whither  she  would.  To  the  high-school  girl  the 
sidewalks  were  laid  on  the  ground ;  to  the  child,  the 
ground  was  hidden  under  the  sidewalks.  His  first  ex- 
perience with  earth  was  not  the  underlying  ground,  but 
the  overlying  sidewalks.  She  had  vainly  thought  to 
begin  at  the  beginning  of  God's  works,  instead  of  the 
real  beginning  of  knowledge-getting, — the  "  point  of 
contact "  with  the  world  as  the  child  sees  it 


Now  to  go  farther.  Whatever  interest  is 
common  to  Christianity  and  heathenism  is 
the  point  of  sympathy  at  which  the  mission- 
ary can  most  hopefully  begin.  This  may  be 
at  a  point  of  contact  with  the  religious  life  of 
the  heathen,  an  attitude,  an  act,  a  rite,  a  hope, 
or  something  which  has  become  already  a 
part  of  his  religious  experience.  There  will 
be  different  starting-points  for  the  Brahman, 
the  Mohammedan,  the  Confucian  ;  the  edu- 
cational genesis  for  the  Bushman  will  be 
different  from  that  for  the  North  American 
Indian. 


THE    PLANE    OF    EXPERIENCE.  37 

A  teacher  at  Hampton  Institute,  Miss 
Annie  Beecher  Scoville,  told  me  that  as  a 
matter  of  fact  the  Indians  can  be  more  easily 
reached  through  the  story  of  the  early  He- 
brews than  can  the  negro.  The  Indian  feels 
a  certain  affiliation  with  Abraham  which  the 
negro  does  not.  The  life  experience  of  the 
Indian  is  nomadic  and  closely  akin  to  the 
Orientals.  The  "  point  of  departure "  or 
starting-point,  in  teaching  the  Indian,  might 
therefore  differ  from  that  in  teaching  the 
negro,  who  touches  life  in  experiences  of 
quite  a  different  nature. 

One  of  the  most  beautifully  apt  and  con- 
vincing illustrations  of  the  necessity  of  ad- 
dressing primitive  minds  from  their  own  plane 
of  experience  is  found  in  a  private  letter  re- 
ceived from  the  Rev.  W.  Govan  Robertson, 
a  missionary  in  British  Central  Africa.  He 
says :  "  I  have  sought  in  vain  for  a  suitable 
abstract  of  Bible  history  which  might  be  trans- 
lated. '  Peep  of  Day  '  we  have,  and  it  an- 
swers a  certain  purpose  '  Line  upon  Line  ' 
has   been    tried,  but   neither   appeals   to   the 


38        POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

native  mind.  There  is  something  far  too 
goody-goody  in  the  phraseology  to  permit  a 
translation.  '  My  dear  children,'  '  Poor  Dan- 
iel,' '  How  glad  he  must  have  been,'  '  How 
beautiful  it  must  have  been  to  see  the  angels,' 
and  so  on,  are  not  translatable.  The  scenes 
of  civilization  are  too  often  brought  in,  and 
the  illustrations  fall  flat.  What  is  wanted  is 
something  vigorous,  not  requiring  much  im- 
agination to  understand,  based  on  wild  native 
life — very  much  like  the  life  of  the  old  Israel- 
ites." 

The  principal  difficulty  encountered  in 
teaching  these  Africans  is  just  the  difficulty 
which  we  encounter,  expressed  in  reverse 
terms.  The  Africans  find  no  point  of  contact 
with  our  civilization  and  modes  of  thought. 
Our  little  children  have  few  points  of  con- 
tact with  ancient  Oriental  life  and  modes  of 
thought.  There  is  a  suggestion  of  caution 
here  in  the  too  easy  satisfaction  with  which 
the  Twenty-third  Psalm  is  given  prominence 
in  the  primary-school  curriculum.  But,  of 
this,  more  hereafter. 


THE    PLANE    OF    EXPERIENCE.  39 

It  is  even  true  of  ourselves  that  these  remote 
Orientalisms  confuse  and  perplex  us.  How 
many  can  read  through  the  Prophets  with  any 
clear  apprehension  of  the  significance  of  allu- 
sion, historical  or  poetical,  made  by  those 
writers  ?  Certainly  a  large  majority  of  fairly 
intelligent  teachers  on  reading  those  books 
gain  only  a  general  sense  of  something  poetic, 
something  historical,  something  religious. 
The  unsatisfaction  which  such  readers  feel 
under  such  circumstances  is  somewhat  paral- 
lel with  the  unsatisfied  child's  mind  after  a 
"  lesson  "  wherein  the  whole  basis  of  thought 
or  action  is  abstract,  or  is  external,  remote 
from,  and  foreign  to,  his  life  experiences. 
But  the  child  cannot  help  himself.  Because 
we  make  the  presentation  entertaining  with 
sentimental  talk  and  ingenious  illustrative 
appliances,  we  imagine  that  he  is  realizing,  or 
re-living,  the  whole  remote  situation. 

Mrs.  Annie  Trumbull  Slosson's  famous 
*'  Fishin'  Jimmy  "  never  got  hold  of  Christ 
until  his  plane  of  experience  was  struck, — 
and    that    the    fishing    interest.     Jimmy  was 


40        POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

practically  insulated  from  salvation  until  that 
one  spot  of  contact  was  discovered,  and 
forthvv'ith  the  current  flowed.  But  the  Book 
of  Romans  would  not  have  availed,  nor  would 
Genesis  have  proved  a  genesis  for  him. 

And  what  about  the  fairy  story  ?  Has  the 
child  ever  had  actual  experience  in  fairyland  ? 
No,  in  so  far  as  there  is  no  real  fairyland — 
and  Yes,  inasmuch  as  the  essentials  of  fairy 
life  are  just  those  of  child  life.  Both  are  ca- 
pricious, both  ignore  conditions  of  time,  space, 
and  natural  cause  and  effect ;  both  are  spon- 
taneous, lawless,  incongruous,  yet  instinct 
with  dreams  of  unlimited  power  and  auto- 
cratic purpose.  Between  the  child  and  the 
fairy  there  is  a  very  close  resemblance  and  a 
natural  affiliation.  They  live  usually  on  a 
common  plane.  Materialistic  reality  com- 
pels their  separation  at  points  only  to  find 
them  in  search  of  one  another  again. 

Any  one  who  does  not  realize  how  widely 
the  adult  and  the  childhood  planes  are  sepa- 
rated will  do  well  to  discover,  after  a  ten  min- 
utes' conversation  with  a  child,  precisely  how 


THE    PLANE    OF    EXPERIENCE.  4I 

far  the  child  understood  him,  and  how  far  he 
understood  the  child.  Let  him  take  Long- 
fellow or  Bryant,  for  instance,  and  discover, 
if  he  can,  how  little  there  is  in  these  poets 
within  the  range  of  the  child's  vision,  and 
how  much  on  another  plane  altogether.  Let 
him  go  farther  and  put  Eugene  Field  to  the 
test,  and  he  will  find  a  very  small  proportion 
of  his  work  really  on  the  plane  of  child  life. 
Again,  let  any  one  take  a  child  of  from  five 
to  eight  into  a  legislative,  or  deliberative,  as- 
sembly for  the  first  time,  and  attempt  to  ex- 
plain the  proceedings.  Every  time  he  puts 
his  foot  down  in  order  to  take  a  step  forward 
in  his  explanation  to  the  child,  he  will  find 
that  he  has  stepped  into  a  quicksand.  The 
very  idea  of  representation  in  government, 
of  passing  bills,  making  motions,  and  espe- 
cially of  controlling  distant  sections  of  country 
by  these  processes,  is  something  entirely  out- 
side of  the  child's  life-plane.  It  is  not  merely 
a  question  of  the  meaning  of  words,  but  it  is 
one  of  complex,  unseen,  and  unsuspected  re- 
lations, one   of  motives   affecting   the   social 


42        POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

organism  of  which  the  child  has  little  appre- 
hension. It  is  one  of  generalizations,  for  the 
construction  of  which  the  child  is  unfurnished 
with  basal  particulars. 

During  the  great  railway  strike  in  Philadel- 
phia, I  closely  watched  some  little  boys  who, 
having  caught  the  destructive  spirit  of  the 
mob,  came  in  and  played  their  part  in  the 
demonstration  of  vengeance  against  the  rail- 
way company.  What  understanding  had 
these  juvenile  offenders  of  what  they  appeared 
to  be  doing  ?  The  sociological  and  economic 
question  between  the  labor  unions  and  the 
railway  corporation  was  doubtless  entirely 
foreign  to  the  plane  of  their  thought.  But 
the  self-active  impulse  to  change  conditions 
by  destruction,  was  quite  within  their  range. 

It  ought  to  be  evident,  then,  that  the  same 
set  of  facts  or  phenomena  may  be  viewed  on 
entirely  different  planes.  A  child  may  seem 
attentive,  interested,  and  even  zealous,  and 
yet  be  entirely  blind  to  those  facts  and  factors 
which  are  absorbing  the  chief  attention  of  his 
elders. 


THE    PLANE    OF    EXPERIENCE.  43 

The  guests  of  a  summer  hotel  were  one 
evening  entertained  with  recitations  by  an 
expert  of  the  platform.  The  children  on  the 
front  row  exhibited  varying  degrees  of  inter- 
est, rising  at  times  to  extreme  demonstrations 
of  delight.  Subsequently  I  found  that  the 
poem  which  drew  from  them  the  loudest 
plaudits  was  not  only  beyond  their  compre- 
hension, but  was  entirely  beyond  their  recall, 
while  that  which  excited  and  absorbed  them 
less  was  remembered.  In  the  first  case  the 
only  thing  on  their  plane  was  the  dramatic 
display  of  personal  action,  while  the  latter 
touched  them  at  a  point  of  contact  with  their 
own  life  interests. 

Once  more :  A  speaker  having  been  in- 
vited to  make  an  address,  and  not  supposing 
children  would  be  in  the  audience  before  him, 
had  designed  to  give  to  parents  some  advice 
about  the  misjudging  of  their  children.  He 
went  prepared  to  give  numerous  incidents  il- 
lustrating the  injustice  of  parental  treatment. 
But  before  him  sat  many  little  children  !  It 
would  not  do  to  have  them  hear  him  arraign 


44        POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

their  parents.  He  therefore  moved  on  two 
distinct  planes  of  motive, — one  for  the  chil- 
dren, one  for  the  adults.  The  former  roared 
with  laughter  at  his  characterizations  of  the 
little  folks  in  difficulty  ;  the  latter  were  more 
seriously  drawing  the  inferences  which  came 
to  them,  more  or  less,  as  self-accusations. 
On  interrogating  certain  of  the  children  some 
time  after,  it  was  evident  that  they  had  not 
seen  the  real  point  of  the  address,  for  its  im- 
plic:  tions  had  been  out  of  their  plane,  while 
the  adults  gave  overt  evidence  of  their  appre- 
ciation of  the  real  motive  of  the  speaker. 

These  illustrations  ought  to  show  clearly 
that  children  of  the  primary  class  may  have 
Scripture  lessons  brought  before  them,  the 
tleatment  of  which  entertains  and  makes 
them  seem  to  be  taking  in  the  whole  historical 
and  spiritual  situation,  while,  in  fact,  they 
and  the  teacher  are  all  the  time  viewing  the 
demonstration  upon  planes  quite  remote  from 
each  other. 

The  child's  plane  of  life  is  one  of  simples 
and  of  concretes,  one  of  directness   and  im- 


THE    PLANE    OF    EXPERIENCE.  45 

mediateness;  one  of  activity,  not  of  reflec- 
tion; one  of  external  appreciations,  not  of  in- 
trospections. Any  attempt  to  force  upon  him 
the  complex,  the  abstract,  the  circuitous,  the 
remote,  the  introspective,  vi^ill  be  sure  to  end 
unhappily. 


Ill 

APPLYING  THE  PRINCIPLE 


Ill 

APPLYING  THE  PRINCIPLE 

Although  the  general  principle  of  appeal- 
ing to  the  youthful  mind  through  the  already 
familiar  fact  in  interested  experience  has  been 
freely  illustrated  in  the  foregoing  chapter,  it 
may  be  helpful  to  show  more  specifically  just 
how  the  principle  can  be  applied  in  practice 
with  persons  of  all  ages,  and  of  various  con- 
ditions and  interests. 

It  is  not  always  possible,  in  dealing  either 
with  an  individual  or  with  aggregations,  to 
strike  the  point  of  closest  contact  with  life  or 
with  the  most  familiar  interests  or  activities, 
but  it  is  possible  to  address  children  on  the 
general  plane  of  child  sight.  Notwithstand- 
ing the  stress  that  has,  in  the  foregoing  pages 
been  laid  upon  things  or  external  objects  of 
sense  perception,  it  is  possible  to  find  the 
point  of  contact  through,  if  not  in,  mere  men 

49 


50        POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

tal  habit  or  bodily  function.  Thus  a  child 
may  be  reached  through  mirth,  or  hunger,  or 
through  his  curiosity  or  his  spirit  of  investi- 
gation. Yet  this  is  not  to  say  that  the  child's 
thought  must  be  turned  back  upon  these  men- 
tal states  or  inward  feelings  as  objects.  We 
can  laugh  with  a  laughing  child  and  admire 
with  an  admiring  child,  but,  after  all,  back 
of  these  emotional  states  lie  the  things  of 
sense  which  awaken  them.  But  all  this  will 
always  have  to  be  within  the  child-life  plane. 
In  "Twinkle,  Twinkle,  Little  Star,"  the 
line  "  How  I  wonder  what  you  are,"  repre- 
sents in  the  adult  a  very  different  mental  at- 
titude toward  the  twinkling  star  from  what  it 
represents  in  the  child.  Speaking  of  nature 
study  Superintendent  Balliet  says  children 
"  are  not  interested  in  the  scientific  distinc- 
tions of  root,  stem,  leaves,  and  flowers — 
plants  must  be  instinct  with  human  attributes  ; 
they  do  not  care  about  the  structure  of  the 
teeth,  the  claws,  the  eyes  of  the  cat  and  the 
dog, — the  cat  and  the  dog  must  appeal  to 
them  as  friends  and  companions  ;  they  do  not 


APPLYING    THE    PRINCIPLE.  5 1 

care  for  the  bear  and  the  fox  of  natural  his- 
tory, it  is  the  bear  and  the  fox  of  the  fairy 
tale  and  the  fable,  endowed  with  human  at- 
tributes, that  touch  their  emotions  and  arouse 
their  deepest  interest." 

Again,  a  "golden  text,"  such  as  some  of 
those  which  have  already  been  cited,  would 
not  be  likely  to  arouse  the  curiosity  or  tempt 
the  inquiring  spirit,  while  a  little  bit  of  nature 
or  manufacture  would  at  once  incite  inquiry 
and  hold  attention. 

Take  an  instance  :  I  was  once  called,  as  a 
substitute,  to  teach  a  class  of  very  frisky  boys 
of  perhaps  nine  to  eleven  years  of  age.  The 
lesson  was  on  the  Golden  Rule.  The  boys 
were  in  a  state  of  ceaseless  activity  and  mis- 
chief-making. It  was  plain  that  they  would 
be  utterly  beyond  my  control  if  I  persisted 
either  in  mere  Scripture  readings  or  with 
ethical  abstractions.  In  less  time  than  it 
takes  to  tell  it,  I  said  to  myself,  "  Get  your 
point  of  contact ;  address  them  through  their 
senses;  get  on  to  the  plane  of  boys'  interests." 
I  immediately  drew  an  ivory  foot-rule  out  of 


52        POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

my  pocket  and  asked  what  it  was.  Silence 
and  attention  were  immediate.  Some  called 
it  a  "  ruler,"  some  a  "  measure,"  and  one 
finally  said  it  was  a  "  rule."  This  experi- 
ential knowledge  of  standards,  curiosity,  and 
investigating  spirit,  at  once  became  my  allies. 
I  had  a  threefold  point  of  contact.  It  is  not 
essential  that  every  boy  should  be  a  carpenter's 
son  or  draughtsman  in  a  case  like  this.  The 
point  of  contact  is  in  reality  not  so  much  with 
a  material  object  as  with  the  sort  of  thing 
— a  standard  of  measurement,  for  instance 
— that  easilv  occupies  a  boy's  mind.  If  the 
object  is  a  thing  of  common  personal  experi- 
ence with  him,  so  much  the  better. 

My  next  inquiry  was  to  ascertain  what  it 
was  made  of.  Some  said  ivory,  some  said 
bone.  The  class  was  in  full  control.  It 
was  easy  then  to  lead  them  on  to  an  imagi- 
nary rule,  through  keeping  them  in  a  certain 
suspense  of  meaning,  until  we  had  reached 
the  Golden  Rule.  Questioning  then  drew 
from  them  the  relative  value  of  ivory  and 
gold,  and  of  rules  made  from  them — real  or 


APPLYING    THE    PRINCIPLE.  53 

figurative.  It  is  unnecessary  to  follow  the 
process  more  in  detail,  but  the  class  was  con- 
quered, for  that  day  at  least,  and  their  dis- 
graceful hubbub  was  turned  into  an  exem- 
plary discussion  of  eternal  truth. 

Golden  texts,  theological  doctrines,  ethical 
abstractions  from  Catechisms  or  the  Epistles, 
taken  in  themselves,  would  have  been  hurled 
at  these  bright  minds  in  vain ;  but  the  con- 
tact with  a  single  tangible  object  such  as  a 
boy  would  use,  or,  at  all  events,  enjoys  hand- 
ling, was  the  successful  point  of  departure  for 
his  spiritual  instruction.  Observe  also  that 
the  lesson  developed  naturally  from  the  mate- 
rial to  the  moral  rule. 

Take  another  case :  A  visitor  was  called 
on  to  address  a  school  made  up  largely  of 
children  more  or  less  familiar  with  country 
life,  and  of  various  ages.  The  lesson  of  the 
day  had  been  on  the  entry  of  the  Israelites 
into  the  promised  land.  He  wanted  to  give 
the  school,  in  less  than  ten  minutes,  a  general 
grasp  of  the  history  of  the  Hebrews  around 
the  full  circuit  from  the  promise  to  Abraham 


54        POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING, 

to  the  realization  of  the  promise,  centuries 
later.  The  details  of  many  Bible  lessons 
necessarily  must  have  obstructed  the  broader 
view  or  general  trend  of  the  history.  He 
must  proceed  upon  the  plan  of  a  circuit  or 
circularity.  From  what  point  in  ordinary  life 
could  they  be  led  into  the  conception  of  cir- 
cularity, and  the  circuit  from  Canaan  through 
Egypt  and  the  Wilderness  back  into  Canaan  ? 
The  first  interest  was  awakened  by  draw- 
ing out,  through  questioning,  their  knowledge 
of  the  oak  and  the  acorn,  and,  again,  by  the 
complete  circuit  made  by  a  drop  of  water 
from  ocean  to  cloud,  to  rain,  to  spring,  to 
river,  and  to  sea  again.  From  contact  with 
this  object  illustration  of  the  idea  of  circu- 
larity it  was  easy  to  lead  the  school  on  to  the 
circuit  that  covered  centuries  in  the  life  of 
the  Hebrews.  This  was  successfully  accom- 
plished in  eight  minutes.  But  it  must  be 
noted  that  the  lesson  here  does  not  develop 
as  naturally  out  of  the  starting-point  as  in  the 
preceding  case.  The  point  of  contact  was 
more  in  the  nature  of  a  catch  at  attention  by 


APPLYING    THE    PRINCIPLE.  55 

artifice  and  was,  therefore,  in  a  measure, 
faulty.  Pedagogically  this  is  of  much  less 
value  than  a  point  of  contact  from  which  the 
essential  teaching  is  not  a  parallelism,  but  an 
organic,  unfolding  unity.  But  this  was  not 
a  grade  class  and  one  may  resort  to  such  arti- 
ficial processes — mere  parallels  or  illustra- 
tions— with  heterogeneous  assemblages,  even 
though  it  cannot  be  regarded  as  a  very  prom- 
ising pedagogical  process. 

Another  illustration  I  extract  from  a  re- 
markably graphic  and  suggestive  article  by 
Elizabeth  Harrison  in  The  Sunday-School 
Times.  It  shows  also  that  the  application  of 
the  principle  is  not  limited  to  little  children. 

A  kindergartner,  visiting  a  mission  school, 
was  asked  by  the  superintendent  to  take  a 
class  of  "  toughs "  which  had  already  been 
given  up  in  despair  by  four  teachers.  The 
threat  of  the  superintendent  to  eject  them 
from  the  room  if  they  did  not  behave  was 
received  with  derisive  laughter.  This  was 
followed,  during  the  opening  exercises,  by 
various  outrageous  antics,  and  then  came  the 


^6        POINi-   OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

time  for  the  lesson  teaching.     Miss  Harrison 
continues  : 

As  soon  as  they  were  settled,  one  boy  raised  his  black- 
ing-box, which  up  to  this  time  had  been  hidden  under 
his  chair ;  with  a  flourish  almost  too  quick  to  be  seen, 
he  scraped  it  across  the  nose  of  another  boy.  This  was 
an  affront  not  to  be  tolerated.  Instantly,  the  insulted 
boy  raised  his  clenched  fist.  In  a  moment  more  the 
blow  would  have  descended,  and  the  usual  street  row 
would  have  taken  place  in  the  Sunday-school  room. 

This  was  our  kindergartner's  opportunity.  "  From 
the  Known  to  the  Unknown  "  had  been  her  motto  for 
years.  Through  curiosity,  reverence  was  to  be  awak- 
ened. Quick  as  a  flash,  she  reached  out  her  hand,  and 
seizing  the  blacking-box  exclaimed,  in  a  tone  of  anima- 
tion :  "  I  can  tell  you  something  about  this  box  that  you 
do  not  know." 

The  boys  were  amazed,  as  they  expected  a  repri- 
mand. The  clenched  fists  slowly  descended ;  all  eyes 
were  fastened  upon  her. 

"  Bah !  "  said  one  of  the  boys,  in  a  tone  of  contempt; 
"  you're  trying  to  guy  us  now." 

"  Indeed,  I  am  not,"  replied  the  kindergartner.  "  I 
know  something  very  wonderful  about  this  box,  and  I 
do  not  believe  any  of  you  ever  heard  it." 

"Give  us  a  rest!"  tauntingly  said  another  skeptic. 
But  all  the  others  cried  out :  "  What  it  is  ?    Go  ahead  !  " 

"  Of  what  is  this  box  made  ?  "  said  the  teacher,  in  a 
slow  and  mysterious  tone  of  voice. 


APPLYING    THE    PRINCIPLE.  57 

•«Wood,  of  course,"  said  two  or  three  of  the  disap- 
pointed group,  the  look  of  contempt  returning  to  their 
faces. 

"Oh,  yes!  of  course,"  responded  the  teacher;  "but 
where  did  the  wood  come  from  ?  " 

"  Out  of  the  carpenter-shop,"  again  answered  two  or 
three. 

"  But  where  did  the  carpenter  get  it  ?  "  said  the  kin- 
dergartner,  still  keeping  up  her  tone  of  mystery. 

"  From  the  lumber-yard,"  answered  one  boy,  more 
knowing  than  the  rest. 

"  Yes,"  said  the  teacher,  encouragingly  ;  "  but  where 
did  the  lumber-yard  man  get  it  ?  " 

This  brought  the  wisest  among  them  to  the  end  of 
his  knowledge. 

She  then  began,  and  described  to  them  the  long,  slow 
growth,  through  centuries  of  time,  of  the  forest  trees. 
The  long,  long  years  of  silent  waiting,  until  the  ax  of  the 
woodman  did  his  work ;  the  busy,  picturesque  life  of  the 
logging-camp ;  the  dangerous  voyage  of  the  logs,  tied 
together  in  a  raft,  as  they  floated  down  the  majestic 
river ;  the  wonderful  invention  by  which  machinery  was 
made  to  transform  these  round  logs  into  flat  boards  ready 
for  the  lumber-yard. 

The  boys  listened  in  intense  interest.  When  she  had 
finished,  there  was  a  deep-drawn  sigh,  and  all  eyes 
turned  instinctively  to  the  blacking-box,  the  mystery  of 
whose  former  life  had  been  unfolded  to  thei»^ 

The  teacher  saw  that  she  had  gained  a  point.  Rever- 
ence must  come  from  idle  curiosity.     Curiosity  had  been 


58        POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

gradually  transformed  into  interest  already.     She  con- 
tinued : 

"  I  think  I  know  something  else  about  this  box  which 
you  do  not  know." 

She  then  drew  out  their  knowledge  about 
the  nails  that  held  it  together,  tracing  the 
process  of  their  manufacture  back  to  the  soli- 
tary bits  of  iron  ore  in  the  mountain  range,  so 
old  that  the  life  of  man  had  no  recoi-d  of  their 
beginning.  She  graphically  pictured  the  life 
of  a  miner.  By  this  time  every  boy  was 
leaning  forward  in  breathless  interest,  fasci- 
nated by  the  new  world  into  which  she  had 
led  him.  Again  taking  up  the  box,  she  asked 
what  color  it  was,  and  pursued  the  same 
method  on  that  point. 

Gradually  the  ringleader  among  the  boys,  leaning 
forward  until  his  head  reached  far  beyond  his  body,  ex- 
claimed in  tones  of  deepest  reverence  : 

'•  I  know  what  you  are.  You're  a  fortune-teller ; 
that's  what  you  are!  " 

This  was  the  highest  tribute  which  he  could  pay 
her.  In  the  back  alley  in  which  he  lived,  a  mysterious 
fortune-teller  played  the  part  of  Delphic  oracle.  To  him 
she  was  the  personification  of  wisdom.     And  there  sat  a 


APPLYING    THE    PRINCIPLE.  59 

woman  before  him  who  apparently  knew  everything, — 
who  could  tell  him  of  that  great  mysterious  world  which 
lay  outside  of  his  district. 

She  had  gained  her  point.  She  had  raised  within 
each  of  them  a  feeling  of  reverence.  .  .  .  Slowly  but 
surely  she  built  up  an  altar  in  them  to  the  unknown 
God,  which  altar  was  necessary  before  the  God  of  right- 
eousness and  of  mercy  and  of  love  could  be  preached 
unto  them. 

To  come  back  more  particularly  to  little 
children,  the  principle  of  the  point  of  contact 
and  the  way  of  leading  the  child  easily  from 
this  point  in  his  experience  to  spiritual  truth 
without  leaving  the  natural  level  of  a  child's 
sight  cannot  be  better  illustrated  than  from 
Froebel's  "  Mother  Play."  ^ 

'  The  reader  is  referred  particularly  to  Susan  E.  Blow's 
translation  of  "  The  Mottoes  and  Commentaries  of 
Friedrich  Froebel's  Mother  Play,"  one  of  the  volumes  of 
Appleton's  International  Education  Series.  "  The 
Alutter-  und  Kose-  lieder"  says  H.  Courthope  Bowen, 
"were  collected  and  composed  and  organized  some  fifty 
years  ago  for  little  German  children — mainly  those  who 
were  surrounded  with  country  sights  and  sounds  and  oc- 
cupations. A  very  small  amount  of  consideration  will 
show,    that  for   little    English  or  American  children — 


60        POINT   OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

especially  when  they  live  in  cities — something  different 
will  be  required  if  a  similar  effect  is  to  be  produced. 
We  shall  require  what  is  English,  or  American,  or  what 
has  become  such.  For  the  rest,  we  must  draw  upon  the 
children's  homes,  and  upon  the  actual  life  by  which  they 
are  surrounded." 


From  so  simple  a  point  in  the  child's 
activities  as  the  pat-a-cake  play  Froebel 
carries  the  little  learner  along  step  by  step 
thus :  "  The  bread,  or,  better  still,  the  little 
cake  which  the  child  likes  so  much,  he  re- 
ceives from  his  mother ;  the  mother,  in  turn, 
receives  it  from  the  baker.  So  far  so  good. 
We  have  found  two  links  in  the  great  chain 
of  life  and  service.  Let  us  beware,  however, 
of  making  the  child  feel  that  these  links  com- 
plete the  chain.  The  baker  can  bake  no 
cake  if  the  miller  grinds  no  meal ;  the  miller 
can  grind  no  meal  if  the  farmer  brings  him 
no  grain  ;  the  farmer  can  bring  no  grain  if 
his  field  yields  no  crop  ;  the  held  can  yield 
no  crop  if  the  forces  of  nature  fail  to  work 
together  to  produce  it ;  the  forces  of  nature 
could  not  conspire  together  were  it  not  for 


APPLYING    THE    PRINCIPLE.  6 1 

the  all-wise  and  beneficent  Power  who  in- 
cites and  guides  them  to  their  predetermined 
ends." 

Observe  how  different  is  this  process  from 
the  common  one  of  forcing  the  child  on  to 
an  adult  plane  through  the  abstractions  of 
theology,  or  systems  of  adult  thought. 

Again,  note  the  suggestion  in  the  play  of 
"  The  Two  Gates  :  "  "  The  idea  suggested 
in  the  farmyard  gate  is  that  the  child  should 
be  taught  to  prize  and  protect  what  he  has 
acquired.  The  thought  illustrated  in  the  gar- 
den gate  is  that  he  should  be  led  to  recognize 
and  name  the  different  objects  in  his  environ- 
ment. In  your  attempt  to  carry  out  the  lat- 
ter idea,  be  careful  to  begin  with  the  things 
which  the  child  sees  around  him  in  the  house, 
the  yard,  the  garden,  and  the  meadow.  From 
these  advance  to  the  naming  of  objects  in  the 
pasture  and  the  wood.  Teach  your  child  not 
only  to  recognize  and  name  objects,  but  also 
to  recognize  and  name  qualities." 

H.  Courthope  Bowen  notes  that  "  actual 
life  and  actual  nature  around  them — or  which 


62        POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

can  be  placed  close  to  them,  are  the  Froebelian 
means  of  education.  Because  the  Charcoal- 
Burner  is  more  picturesque,  more  romantic, 
than  The  Cabman^  that  does  not  make  him 
more,  it  makes  him  less  effective  for  our  pur- 
pose. It  is  with  cabmen,  not  charcoal-burn- 
ers, that  so  many  little  city  children  have  to 
do.  What  Froebel  bids  us  is  to  make  the  life 
and  doings  of  the  cabman  interesting — yes, 
and  even  beautiful  in  their  way — for  the  lit- 
tle ones  who  come  in  contact  with  them ; 
and  so  of  all  the  physical  world  that  comes 
within  touch  of  the  children ;  till  the  very 
stones  of  the  dingy  pavement  become  won- 
derful, full  of  suggestion,  part  of  the  golden 
chain  that  links  the  world  to  God."  Bowen 
elsewhere  notes  that  "  for  those  little  city 
children  we  should  not  tell  of  The  Fish  in 
the  Brook  but  of  The  Sparroiu  in  the  Street ; 
not  of  The  Nest  with  its  birdlings,  but  of  The 
Cat  and  her  Kittens ;  not  of  The  Charcoal- 
Burner^  but  of  The  Costermonger^  The  Cabman^ 
The  Newspaper  Boy^  The  Watercress  IFo/nan ; 
not   of   The    Wolf  and  the   Boar^  but  of   The 


APPLYING   THE    PRINCIPLE.  63 

Dog;  and  even  instead  of  playing  at  "mow- 
ing the  grass  "  it  would  be  better  for  those 
little  children  to  play  at  "  sweeping  the  room." 

The  weather-vane  is  another  familiar  ob- 
ject in  the  child's  life.  P^oebel  here  admi- 
rably illustrates  the  difference  between  con- 
ducting the  child  always  on  the  plane  of  his 
own  natural  powers  or  appreciations,  and  con- 
fusing him  by  thrusting  him  out  of  it.  "  I 
might  as  well  talk  to  you  in  a  foreign  tongue 
as  to  tell  you  that  '  the  pressure  of  air,  or  its 
altered  density,  or  a  change  in  its  tempera- 
ture, causes  wind  '  !  You  would  not  under- 
stand a  single  word  of  this  explanation.  But 
one  thing  you  can  understand  even  now:  A 
single  mighty  power  like  the  wind  can  do 
many  things  great  and  small.  You  see  the 
things  it  does,  though  you  cannot  see  the 
wind  itself.  There  are  many  things,  my 
child,  which  we  can  be  sure  of  though  we 
cannot  see  them." 

Enough  has  been  said  to  demonstrate  the 
very  important  double  principle  of  beginning 
at  the  point  of  contact  with  experience  and 


64        POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

of  reaching  high  spiritual  truths  by  keeping 
always  upon  the  child's  plane  or  level  of  life. 

In  aiming  for  new  truth,  and  especially 
spiritual  truth,  however,  we  must  allow  the 
child,  or  man,  to  make  the  final  reach  through 
his  own  self-activity.  He  never  can  know 
anything  unless  he  has  himself  worked  it  into 
his  own  life.  One  great  fault  of  our  primary 
religious  instruction  is  that  it  is  too  clogged 
with  process,  or  method.  Our  Lord  usually 
left  it  to  the  people  to  work  out  his  sudden 
transitions  from  the  physical  to  the  spiritual 
— from  water  to  the  water  of  life,  from  bodily 
to  spiritual  healing,  etc.  Sometimes  his  tran- 
sition truth  lay  in  a  double  meaning,  as  in 
"  the  wind  bloweth  [spirit  breatheth]  where 
it  listeth."  This  is  quite  too  occult  for  a 
child,  but  it  illustrates  our  Lord's  knowledge 
of  the  necessity  of  allowing  the  pupil's  mind 
to  perform  its  part  in  gaining  that  knowledge 
which  is  power.  Our  moral  tags,  or  appli- 
cations, are  the  ruin  of  many  of  our  Bible 
and  other  stories  for  children. 

The  Salvation  Army  seeks  and  finds  the  de- 


APPLYING    THE    PRINCIPLE.  65 

graded  wretches  of  the  slums,  and  others,  not 
through  a  map  of  Palestine,  nor  through  the 
Catechism,  but  through  that  which  is  com- 
mon to  their  experience, — noise  and  racket, 
the  bass  drum  and  the  brass  horn.  The  loud 
music  and  the  bright  colors  are  the  "  lines  of 
least  resistance  "  over  which  this  species  of 
human  nature  passes  into  the  first  contempla- 
tion of  a  cleaner,  better,  and  nobler  life. 
Similarly,  a  child  is  to  be  introduced  to  his 
studies  at  the  point  of  experience, — to  ge- 
ography by  starting  at  his  sense  perceptions 
of  distance,  direction,  form,  number,  rain, 
snow,  clouds,  steam,  vapor,  heat,  cold,  etc. ; 
then  locations  at  home  and  vicinity,  the  yard, 
garden,  farm,  or  landscape  in  view,  etc. 

A  live  teacher  in  the  South  wrote  to  me, 
"  My  mother  most  interestingly  taught  me 
botany  from  the  '  point  of  contact '  of  the 
yellow  pollen  on  my  nose  when  I  had  smelled 
a  fragrant  flower  too  ardently." 

In  response  to  the  author's  first  publication 
on  this  subject  of  the  point  of  contact,  a 
teacher  in  the  Southwest,  iMr.  James  Newton 


66        POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

Baslcett,  wrote :  "  You  are  eminently  right 
about  your  Sunday-school  methods.  It  is 
God's  way.  Jesus  went  to  the  people  at 
their  point  of  contact,  and,  though  a  carpen- 
ter, he  never  drew  a  figure  from  his  own  call- 
ing, but  always  from  theirs."  He  then  goes 
on  to  give  his  experience  in  feeling  for  a 
point  of  contact  from  which  to  start  an  inter- 
est in  ornithology  in  a  country  boy.  He 
says : 

"  Recently  I  attempted  to  describe  the 
oven-bird  to  a  country  boy  who,  I  knew,  had 
often  seen  it,  but  did  not  know  it.  I  went 
through  plumage,  size,  song,  nest,  etc.,  but 
the  case  looked  hopeless.  At  last  I  men- 
tioned the  habit  of  alighting  near  the  limb 
and  running  out  toward  its  tip.  His  face 
brightened.  '  Is  he  a  kind  of  high  stepper?  ' 
he  asked,  picking  up  his  feet  exactly  as  the 
bird  does.  In  this  way  the  boy  has  become 
a  helpful  observer — learning  how  to  observe. 
His  descriptions  are  so  accurate  that  I  often 
diagnose  birds  from  them  before  he  is  through. 
He  has  a  new  interest  in  his  farm  work.      He 


APPLYING    THE    PRINCIPLE.  67 

could  never  have  got  it  from  systematic  orni- 
thology." No  more  can  the  child  get  his  in- 
terest in  religious  truth  through  systematic 
theology,  catechisms,  or  other  adult  forms  of 
conventionalized  and  abstract  thought,  or 
images  based  on  material  things  with  which 
the  child  has  never  come  into  sense  contact. 
Knowledge  is  power.  Power  and  knowledge 
alike  are  the  sign  of  life.  Only  from  life  can 
life  come.  Out  of  the  concrete  experience 
the  child  abstracts  a  general  truth  or  principle, 
and  then  out  of  this  abstraction  of  his  own 
making  comes  again  his  concrete,  outward 
deed. 

A  little  girl  once  asked  me  about  the  bones 
ill  her  arm.  I  briefly  explained,  but  the  off- 
hand explanation  was  not  likely  to  remain 
with  her.  Soon  after  came  a  day  when  I 
carved  a  chicken  for  dinner.  Giving  her  a 
wing,  I  said,  "  You  see  this  part  has  one 
bone  and  this  part  two.  It  is  like  our  arms." 
I  subsequently  showed  her  a  human  skeleton. 
The  next  time  she  was  given  a  chicken  wing 
i;t  dinner,  I  said,  "  You  know  there  are  two 


68    POINT  OF  CONTACT  IN  TEACHING. 

bones  here,  as  in  our  forearms.  Chickens' 
wings  take  the  place  of  our  arms."  "  Or," 
she  responded,  "wouldn't  the  chickens  say, 
if  they  could  talk  about  us,  '  Their  arms  take 
the  place  of  our  wings  '  ?  " 

Suppose  I  had  answered,  "  Ah,  my  child, 
we  must  begin  at  the  beginning  !  Anatomy 
is 'that  branch  of  morphology  which  treats 
of  the  structure  of  organisms.'  There  are 
various  divisions  of  the  subject,  as  compara- 
tive anatomy,  pathological  anatomy,  prac- 
tical, surgical,  topographical,  transcendental 
anatomies,  etc.  Let  us  take  nature  in  an 
orderly  way.  You  must  first  commit  to 
memory  the  definition  of  anatomy  and  the 
technology  of  the  bones  themselves.  In 
after  years  it  will  serve  you  when  you  come 
to  study  the  arm  of  man  and  the  wing  of 
bird." 

Is  this  a  travesty  ?  Call  it  rather  a  parallel. 
Has  it  not  been  practically  the  procedure  in 
many  Sunday  and  day  schools  ?  No,  our 
starting-point  is  not  a  logical  definition  or 
historical  beginning,  but  a  point  in  the  pupil's 


APPLYING    THE    PRINCIPLE.  6g 

experience.  In  commenting  on  the  course 
in  physical  geography  in  Pestalozzi's  school 
Froebel  says,  "  Particularly  unpleasant  to  me 
was  the  commencement  of  the  course  which 
began  with  an  account  of  the  bottom  of  the 
sea,  although  the  pupils  could  have  no  con- 
ception of  their  own  as  to  its  nature  or  di- 
mensions." 

As  has  been  intimated,  this  principle  is  not 
peculiar  to  childhood  but  is,  in  a  degree,  uni- 
versal. The  previous  chapter  quotes  Mr. 
Robertson's  observation  on  the  necessity  of 
reaching  the  wild  African  on  the  plane  of 
his  experience.  How  would  our  principle 
be  applied  in  Central  Africa?  In  response 
to  my  request  Mr.  Robertson  wrote  an  article 
for  The  Sunday  School  Times  on  "  The  Use 
of  Native  Tradition  and  Superstition  in 
Bible  Teaching  among  Africans."     He  says  : 

"  How  best  to  bring  the  Bible  teachings  to  bear  upon 
the  understanding  and  conscience  of  the  uncivilized  and 
uneducated  native,  is  a  question  with  which  one  is  con- 
stantly confronted  in  his  work  in  Central  Africa.  With 
him  there  is  none  of  the  •  hereditary  knowledge '  of  the 


70        POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

Bible,  which  is  so  useful  in  dealing  with  even  the  most 
degraded  in  Christian  lands.  Neither  is  there  Christian 
sentiment  nor  example  to  help  him. 

"  The  theme  of  the  Bible  is  so  far  out  of  the  ordinary 
course  of  his  thoughts,  and  its  language,  even  in  our 
best  translations,  so  foreign  to  his  ear,  that  it  is  with  dif- 
ficulty his  interest  can  be  aroused.  Add  to  these  the 
difficulty  of  teaching  him  by  analogy,  and  his  inability 
to  generalize  or  analyze  his  conclusions,  and  one  has 
some  idea  of  what  a  missionary  has  to  overcome  in 
simply  placing  the  gospel  message  before  his  congrega- 
tion. 

"  With  a  good  knowledge  of  the  language,  and  the 
confidence  of  the  people,  the  observant  may  find  a  story 
of  native  tradition  and  superstitious  ceremony  firmly  im- 
planted in  the  native  mind,  of  which  he  can  make  use, 
as  did  Paul  at  Athens  (Acts  xvii.  22,  23),  to  illustrate 
and  enforce  his  message. 

"  Reference  to  such  a  native  story  at  once  secures  the 
attention,  and  constitutes  a  common  ground  of  sympathy 
between  speaker  and  audience.  And  it  w  a  common 
ground,  for  God  created  all  men  '  in  his  own  image,' 
and  left  upon  the  consciences  of  all  some  '  witness '  of 
himself." 

The  native  African  may  thus  be  touched 
at  a  point  in  his  experience — his  thought, 
feeling,  and  devotional  attitude,  which  is  an 
experience    in    common    with    him    and    his 


APPLYING    THE    PRINCIPLE.  7 1 

Christian  teacher.  This  is  his  spiritual  gate 
of  entry  to  the  Kingdom  of  Christ.  No  one 
illustrated  this  principle  of  the  point  of  con- 
tact in  experience  better  than  Paul  when  he 
began  his  sermon  with  the  unknown  God  as 
his  text. 

The  Rev.  Mr.  Poole,  agent  of  the  Chris- 
tian League,  among  the  Chinese  in  Phila- 
delphia, says  that  these  Chinamen  are  reached 
through  their  desire  to  learn  to  read.  He 
remarks  that  if  he  should  begin  by  telling 
them  not  to  worship  idols,  they  would  turn 
away.  Idols  are  indeed  on  the  plane  of  their 
interests,  but  a  point  of  contact  must  be 
handled  by  the  teacher  sympathetically,  and 
not  aggressively  or  inimically.  "Every 
Chinaman  that  has  been  reached  in  China- 
town," says  Mr.  Poole,  "  has  been  reached 
through  the  spelling-book.  By  the  time 
they  get  confidence  in  us  they  reach  a  point 
in  the  primer  that  says  '  God  loves  all,'  '  God 
loves  me,'  etc." 

It  is  said  that  when  the  new  queen  of 
Madagascar   saw  that   the   missionaries  were 


7i        POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

making  headway  with  the  people  she  ordered 
them  out  of  her  kingdom.  They  remon- 
strated by  saying  that  they  were  only  teach- 
ing Greek  and  Hebrew  with  some  other 
branches  of  knowledge.  The  queen,  relent- 
ing, said  she  wanted  her  people  taught  some- 
thing useful.  If  they  could  teach  them  to 
make  soap  there  would  be  some  excuse  for 
their  presence.  The  missionaries  sent  the 
queen  a  bar  of  soap  and  gained  her  favor. 
Soap  was  the  material  point  of  contact — the 
centre  of  native  interest  from  which  Chris- 
tianity was  to  be  developed.  Here  is  a  new 
application  of  the  proverb  "  Cleanliness  is 
next  to  godliness  "  ! 

A  writer  in  Congregational  Work  says : 

"  Recently  a  colporteur  in  Korea  gathered  some  people 
about  him,  but  before  he  could  tell  them  anything  about 
the  good  books  which  he  carried,  and  which  he  wished 
them  to  buy  and  read,  they  had  to  feel  of  him  and  handle 
his  hat  and  his  clothes.  In  some  places  a  missionary 
has  been  asked  to  take  off  his  shoes  and  stockings,  that 
the  people  may  see  whether  he  really  has  feet  and  toes 
like  themselves.  Once  a  missionary  in  China,  after  he 
had  preached  to  a  company  which  seemed  to  be  listen- 


APPLYING    THE    PRINCIPLE.  73 

ing  intently,  asked  if  any  of  those  present  would  like  to 
make  any  inquiries  that  they  might  know  more  about 
what  he  had  been  saying,  to  which  one  of  the  company 
said  immediately,  '  We  would  like  to  know  what  those 
two  buttons  on  the  back  of  your  coat  are  for.'  " 

No  point  of  contact  with  superstitious, 
ignorant,  and  especially  Oriental  people  is 
more  effective  than  that  on  the  plane  of  heal- 
ing; hence  the  advantage  of  the  medical  mis- 
sionary. Dr.  W,  J.  Wanless,  of  the  Ameri- 
can Presbyterian  Mission  in  India,  writing  in 
The  Sunday  School  Times,  says  : 

"The  medical  missionary  as  a  follower  of  Christ  has 
an  immense  advantage  in  his  ability  to  disarm  preju- 
dice, and  prepare  the  way  for  the  preaching  and  recep- 
tion of  the  gospel  message.  Christ's  healing  miracles 
attracted  the  multitudes,  and,  because  of  them  '  the  com- 
mon people  heard  him  gladly.'  The  same  attention  is 
gained  by  medical  missionaries  in  every  mission  land 
to-day.  Thousands  flock  for  bodily  treatment,  and  they 
hear  of  Him  who  alone  heals  the  soul.  In  no  station 
of  our  western  India  mission  has  it  been  so  easy  to  ob- 
tain property  and  secure  the  good-will  of  the  people  and 
state,  and  enjoy  the  opportunity  of  preaching  to  all 
classes,  as  in  Miraj,  the  centre  of  the  mission's  medical 
work. 

"  More  than  three  hundred  different  villages  are  annu- 


74        POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

ally  represented  in  the  patients  of  all  castes  who  seek 
relief  in  the  Miraj  dispensary  and  hospital.  And  all 
willingly  hear  the  gospel, — hundreds  for  the  first  time, 
and  thousands  repeatedly.  In  the  hospital  for  weeks 
together  many  listen  to  the  daily  explanation  of  the 
Scriptures.  Numbers  of  these  people  come  hundreds  of 
miles  for  treatment.  The  majority  come  from  villages 
beyond  a  fifteen-mile  radius  of  Miraj.  During  their 
residence  in  the  hospital,  or  while  attending  the  dispen- 
sary, the  patients  often  learn  more  by  what  they  see  than 
by  what  they  are  verbally  taught.  The  teaching  is  '  illus- 
trated.' Gospel  deeds,  the  fruit  of  gospel  commands, 
are  acted  in  their  presence.  These  things,  so  foreign  to 
their  own  religious  systems,  are  matters  of  amazement  to 
them.  .  .  . 

"  In  view  of  the  foregoing,  it  is  not  surprising  that,  in 
their  ignorance,  they  regard  us  with  worshipful  rever- 
ence. It  is,  indeed,  a  matter  of  almost  daily  occurrence, 
that  we  have  to  check  them  in  the  very  act  of  worship- 
ing us.  Entering  the  hospital,  one  hears  from  a  new 
comer,  '  Here  comes  our  god,'  '  He  is  the  great  God,' 
'  Where  is  there  a  god  like  him  ?  '  '  Sahib,  you  are  our 
god,'  etc.  The  other  day,  on  entering  the  ward,  a 
patient  whose  leg  we  had  amputated  called  me  to  his 
bedside,  and  said,  '  Sahib,  put  your  feet  on  my  bed.' 
'  And  for  what  ?  '  I  asked,  surprised.  '  I  want  to  wor- 
ship them,'  he  replied.  Such  occasions  always  furnish 
us  with  a  text  on  which  to  speak  against  idolatry,  the 
sin  so  common  to  them, — the  sin  of  giving  God's  glory 
to  man." 


APPLYING    THE    PRINCIPLE.  75 

The  real  point  of  contact  is  here  indicated 
to  be  in  the  idea  of  a  common  humanity. 
These  natives  could  hardly  understand  how 
anything  so  different  could  really  be  one  of 
their  kind  with  only  a  little  surface  variation. 
This  was  their  interest — an  experience  in 
their  narrow  lives.  And  what  better  starting- 
point  for  teaching  Christianity  than  human 
brotherhood  ? 

Dr.  George  Matheson,  in  his  "  Studies  of 
the  Portrait  of  Christ,"  emphasizing  the  fact 
that  it  is  because  men  are  so  much  alike  that 
they  notice  their  differences,  speaks  suggestive 
hints  for  us  at  this  point.  There  is  a  com- 
mon plane,  for  instance,  on  which  the  disciples 
of  Confucius  and  of  Jesus  can  meet  and  un- 
derstand each  other.  Confucius,  like  Jesus, 
values  commonplace  duties  and  the  power  to 
do  little  things.  But  the  reason  why  he  values 
them  is  not  the  reason  why  Jesus  values  them. 
Confucius  wants  men  to  be  worldly  and  to 
show  the  proof  of  earthly  intelligence  ;  Jesus 
wants  them  to  be  unworldly  and  to  show  the 
proof  of  heavenly  intelligence. 


76        POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

Again,  there  are  likenesses  between  Buddha 
and  Christ.  Both  demand  an  emptying  of 
self;  both  select  poverty,  privation,  and  toil. 
From  this  common  plane  of  likeness,  or  point 
of  contact,  between  the  followers  of  Jesus 
and  of  Buddha,  the  Buddhist  is  to  be  led  to 
the  essential  difference  between  the  two  classes 
of  disciples.  The  cross  to  Buddha  means 
submission  to  human  misery  ;  to  Jesus  it  is  a 
protest  against  such  misery.  Buddha  wants 
men  to  bow  the  knee  to  their  own  nothingness  ; 
Jesus  wants  them  to  lift  the  burdens  that  hu- 
miliate mankind.  Jesus  would  not  teach 
submission  to  pain,  but  resistance  to  it. 

Once  more,  Zoroaster  is  at  one  with  Jesus 
in  calling  on  men  to  recognize  the  struggle 
with  evil ;  the  earth  is  a  battlefield  between 
powers  of  earth  and  those  of  heaven.  From 
this  common  plane,  or  point  of  contact,  the 
Zoroastrian  is  to  be  led  away  from  Zoroaster's 
call  to  put  on  the  warlike  spirit  to  Jesus'  call 
to  put  on  the  spirit  of  peace.  The  power 
that  overcomes  the  world  with  Jesus  is  peace 
and  mental  calm. 


APPLYING    THE    PRINCIPLE.  77 

Finally,  Dr.  Matheson  cites  the  Stoics. 
There  is  much  in  common  here  with  the 
teachings  of  Jesus  also.  Epictetus  stands 
upon  the  sea  because  he  has  conquered  his 
passions  ;  Jesus  stands  upon  the  sea  by  reason 
of  a  great  passion  of  love — what  we  call  the 
Lord's  passion.  Epictetus  has  reached  forti- 
tude by  restraining  the  vital  stream ;  Jesus 
has  reached  fortitude  by  enlarging  the  vital 
stream.  Epictetus  has  won  by  suppressing 
emotion ;  Jesus  has  won  by  the  emotion  of  a 
wider  interest.  .  .  .  The  one  has  crucified 
the  sense  of  danger;  the  other  has  eclipsed 
it  by  the  sense  of  a  greater  danger.  The 
one  has  conquered  by  the  contraction,  the 
other  by  the  expansion,  of  the  heart." 

These  are  suggestive  illustrations  of  the 
way  in  which  the  modern  missionary  is  to 
apply  the  principle  of  the  point  of  contact  at 
the  plane  of  experience  and  of  leading  there- 
from to  the  hitherto  unknown  Christian  truth. 
There  is  always  a  possibility  of  establishing 
contact  at  the  point  of  likeness,  sympathy, 
and  common  interest,  between  men  and  men 


78        POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

in  all  parts  of  the  globe,  and  we  have  thus 
seen  how  the  principle  works  in  the  case  of 
African,  North  American  Indian,  Confucian, 
Zoroastrian,  Buddhist,  etc. 

The  applications  of  the  principle  may  be 
extended  in  other  directions.  For  instance, 
how  can  it  be  applied  in  music  teaching  ? 
Here  is  a  real  case  :  A  music  teacher  having 
a  young  boy  for  a  pupil  was  much  discouraged 
by  his  indifference  and  utter  lack  of  interest 
in  his  task.  On  questioning  him  she  found 
that  he  regarded  piano  playing  as  something 
for  girls  and  not  for  boys  to  do.  Having  the 
natural  teaching  instinct  she  saw  that  the  boy, 
who  was  thus  suffering  from  the  delusion  that 
he  was  engaged  in  an  effeminate  business, 
must  be  reached  through  his  interests  as  a  boy 
— through  boy  life.  So  she  tactfully  played 
the  few  notes  of  an  army  bugle-call  on  the 
piano,  and  asked  him  whether  he  knew  what 
that  was.  She  explained  its  meaning  as  mili- 
tary language  and  immediately  had  a  hold  on 
him.  Nor  did  she  stop  there,  for  she  bought 
a  book  of  bugle-calls  and  used  them  as  excr- 


APPLYING    THE    PRINCIPLE.  79 

cises.  The  boy  became  intensely  interested 
as  each  call  brought  up  a  mental  picture  of 
army  life.  Music  and  the  piano  were  no 
longer  a  feminine  pastime.  The  boy  was 
won  through  his  masculine  interests. 

Many  a  parent  is  puzzled  to  know  how  to 
interest  the  children  in  good  reading.  An 
article  on  this  subject  by  Antoinette  Bryant 
Hervey,  in  The  Chautauquan  (January,  1900), 
contains  some  excellent  illustrations  of  our 
principle.     She  says  : 

"  To  develop  a  love  of  good  reading,  we  must  not  only 
set  an  example,  and  begin  early,  but  we  must  enter  so 
sympathetically  into  youthful  tastes  and  standards  that 
we  can  start  from  the  child's  actual  interest  rather  than 
from  what  we  think  he  ought  to  be  interested  in.  Some 
little  boys  in  a  New  York  school,  at  the  age  when  the 
collecting  instinct  is  strong,  formed  a  unique  club  for 
collecting  the  dirty  stubs  of  streetcar  tickets  which  the 
conductors  throw  on  the  ground.  One  boy's  mother  for- 
bade it  at  once,  with  the  result  that  he  collected  on  the 
sly,  and  hid  the  stubs  in  the  basement.  Another  mother, 
equally  disgusted  with  the  dirty  stubs  which  filled  her 
son's  desk,  and  with  the  way  he  went  along  the  street 
with  eyes  for  nothing  but  stubs,  took  an  entirely  differ- 
ent course.     She  started  from  stubs,  a  worthless  interest, 


80        POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

and  led  him  off  into  stamps,  a  useful  interest.  First,  by 
suggesting  that  transfers  were  much  more  interesting 
than  stubs,  she  led  him  to  study  the  transfers  and  their 
meaning,  till  he  could  tell  every  cross-town  line  from 
125th  Street  to  the  Battery,  and  became  absorbingly  in- 
terested in  the  geography  of  New  York.  Upon  the 
transfer  interest  it  was  easy  to  graft  the  postage-stamp 
interest,  from  which  in  turn  sprang  a  whole  bunch  of 
interests,  geographical,  historical,  ethnological. 

"  Another  problem  in  interest  grafting  is  presented  by 
the  mother  of  a  boy  of  twelve,  who,  she  says,  '  cares  for 
nothing  but  horses.  He  will  not  read,  or  listen  to  read- 
ing.' According  to  the  principle  of  '  grafting,'  the 
solution  is  simply  to  begin  with  some  book  about  horses. 
Even  so  badly  written  a  story  as  '  Black  Beauty  '  may 
serve  as  a  stepping-stone.  Then  perhaps  Kiplmg's  story 
— '  The  Maltese  Cat ' — of  the  horses  who  really  played 
the  polo  game,  and  that  other  horse  story  in  •  The  Day's 
Work,'  'A  Walking  Delegate.'  Then  «The  Bell  of 
Atri,'  by  Longfellow,  and  the  story  of  Pegasus,  in  Haw- 
thorne's '  Wonder  Book.'  By  that  time,  and  even  much 
earlier,  the  boy  will  easily  be  led  to  books  of  exploration, 
and  books  about  strange  people,  and  then,  before  you 
know  it,  your  boy  is  interested  in  history." 

Thus  far  we  have  considered  more  par- 
ticularly the  individual  interest,  but  the  prin- 
ciple can  be  and  often  is  applied  to  the  public 
mind.     When  Froebel  was  in  need  of  funds 


APPLYING    THE    PRINCIPLE.  0  1 

to  establish  his  institution  at  Blankenburg  in 
1840,  he  took  advantage  of  the  four-hun- 
dredth anniversary  of  printing  to  advertise 
and  secure  attention  to  his  scheme.  In  his 
reminiscences,  Dr.  H.  Clay  Trumbull  relates 
how  Thomas  K.  Beecher,  being  asked  to 
speak,  in  Hartford,  on  the  Devil,  made  his 
point  of  contact  with  the  public  mind 
through  the  popular  excitement  over  spirit- 
ualism which  was  then  centred  at  Hartford. 
Similarly,  times  of  thanksgiving,  of  calamity, 
of  national  emotion  of  any  kind,  furnish 
states  or  planes  of  experience  through  which 
the  public  is  often  to  be  most  successfully 
appealed  to  in  any  appropriate  interest  or 
cause. 


IV 

MISSING  THE  POINT 


IV 


MISSING  THE  POINT 

There  are  those  who  have  a  certain 
intuitive  sense  that  the  point  of  interest  to  a 
child  and  the  point  of  departure,  or  starting, 
in  his  instruction,  should  be  something 
which  to  them  seems  childish  and  simple. 
Consequently  they  often  succeed  in  gaining 
entry  to  the  child  mind.  But,  having 
no  formulated  guiding  principle,  they  also 
often  fail. 

To  illustrate  :  I  remember  once  hearing 
an  address  to  children  based  upon  the  text, 
"  The  little  foxes  that  spoil  the  vines." 
These  little  foxes  were  our  small  vices  or 
weaknesses.  Why  did  the  speaker  choose 
such  a  point  of  departure  ?  I  suppose  "  the 
little  foxes  "  had  a  simple,  childlike  sound 
about  it  to  him,  and  seemed  as  though  it 
would   be  easily  a   point  of  interest  to  little 

85 


86        POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

children.  Perhaps  it  was,  in  so  far  as  it 
roused  their  curiosity.  Whatever  the  chil- 
dren got  out  of  the  address,  they  got  in  spite 
of,  rather  than  because  of,  the  point  of 
departure,  which  was  not  a  point  of  contact 
with  common  experience.  To  very  few 
children  docs  a  fox  exist  in  more  than  name, 
if  that ;  and  the  propensity  of  foxes  for  spoil- 
ing vines  is  one  which  they  could  not  appre- 
ciate unless  they  had  lived  in  a  country  where 
they  had  actually  seen  this  kind  of  destruction 
wrought,  or  heard  it  talked  about  until  it 
became  a  familiar  fact. 

In  the  same  way,  writers  for  children  often 
seem  to  suppose  that  they  are  placing  them- 
selves on  the  child's  plane  by  the  use  of  certain 
kinds  of  youthful  expressions  and  by  a  kind 
of  forced  intimacy  of  manner,  while  the  sit- 
uations, the  motives  and  raw  material  out  of 
which  the  story  or  article  is  made,  are  foreign 
to  the  child's  perception,  thought,  or  feeling. 

Certain  "  appliances "  frequently  used  in 
the  primary  school  as  a  part  of  the  process 
of  "  adapting  "  the  lesson  matter  sometimes 


MISSING    THE    POINT. 


fail  because,  forming  no  links  with  the 
child's  own  experience,  they  merely  centre 
the  interest  on  themselves  as  objects. 

Miss  Julia  E.  Peck  well  says :  "  In  our 
attempts  to  meet  the  child  on  his  own 
level  we  have  fallen  very  far  below  his 
level,  failing  to  note  from  week  to  week 
that  the  dignity  of  his  simplicity  is  a  lasting 
rebuke  to  our  fussy  sentimentality." 

Again,  history  as  such  is  a  concept  practi- 
cally out  of  the  primary  child's  power  of 
acquirement.  He  has  too  few  years  behind 
him  in  his  own  experience,  and  has  had  too 
little  dealing  with  that  impersonal  thing — 
organized  society.  History  as  personal 
biography,  Bible  stories  as  such,  have  a 
very  large  educational  function  for  the  little 
child,  but  not  as  history.  No  matter  what 
delight  the  children  show  in  paraphernalia,  no 
matter  what  pat  answers  they  give,  we  must 
be  suspicious  of  the  delight  and  the  answers, 
and  we  must  look  for  another  cause  than 
historical  consciousness. 

An  illustration  is  to  be  found  in  the  follow- 


88        POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

ing,  which  was  sent  to  me  by  an  experienced 
secular  as  well  as  Sunday-school  teacher. 
She  says  :  "  I  shall  not  soon  forget  my  own 
struggles  with  the  International  lessons.  I  had 
small  boys  from  six  to  eight  years  old.  The 
lesson  was  Nehemiah's  prayer.  I  had  tried 
very  hard  to  make  the  lesson  practical,  and 
entertaining  as  well,  but  I  am  afraid  I  must 
have  succeeded  too  well,  for  when  I  asked 
one  small  boy  how  many  years  ago  he  thought 
all  these  things  had  happened,  he  opened  his 
eyes  very  wide,  and  ventured,  *  I  guess  about 
a  week.'  I  think  he  thought  that  he  had  been 
rash  in  suggesting  such  a  remote  period." 
We  remember  certain  events  of  our  child- 
hood only  as  incidents  in  that  life.  They 
seldom  have  any  historicity  about  them. 
Their  chronological  order  we  are  seldom 
conscious  of  unless  we  have  worked  it  out  in 
later  life  by  reasoning  upon  it. 

A  young  lady  tells  me  that  she  remembers 
the  terrible  attacks  of  earache  she  used  to 
suffer  from  when  a  child.  But  her  mother 
says  she  never  had  more  than  one  attack ! 


MISSING    THE    POINT.  89 

A  writer  in  the  London  Academy  thus 
shows  how  completely  "  Gray's  Elegy  "  is  re- 
mote from  the  schoolboy's  plane  of  experi- 
ence.    He  says  : 

"  To  carry  boys  over  the  Pons  Asinorum  is  child's  play 
compared  with  making  them  understand  the  •  Elegy.'  I 
remember  how  I  used  to  grind  through  it  without  one 
word  of  explanation  when  I  was  a  little  fellow  of  ten 
years  of  age  [observe,  ten  !  ]  :  each  line  went  by  itself, 
and  one  conseciuence  was  that  the  tiling  in  the  piece  that 
impressed  me  most  was  the  reference  to 

The  dark  unfathomed  caves  of  ocean  bear. 

I  had  had  my  neck  nearly  wrung  off  in  those  days  for 
once  saying  that  a  noun  •  governed '  something,  and  I 
was  not  the  boy  to  risk  further  twisting  by  asking  if  it 
was  the  polar  bear  that  was  meant ;  but  there  was  a 
magnificent  remoteness  in  the  dwelling  of  this  creature 
that  always  pleased  me,  and  it  was  not  till  later  that  I 
discovered  what  the  verse  really  meant. 

"  Yet  the  real  case  against  the  '  Elegy '  has  still  to  be 
stated.  It  is  not  the  presence  of  isolated,  difficult  lines 
which  makes  Gray's  poem  the  most  unsuitable  in  the 
language  to  put  before  boys.  It  is  the  whole  mind  of 
the  '  Elegy,'  which  is  a  concentrated  account  of  a  mood 
impossible  to  the  young.  The  poem  touches  a  boy  no- 
where. It  gives  him  no  cue ;  there  is  no  beckoning 
familiar  thing  to  hearten  and  invite.  .  .  .     What  root 


90        POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

has  it  in  boyhood  ?  What  boy  ever  believed  in  the 
'  hoary-headed  swain '  or  the  '  forefathers  of  the  ham- 
let '  ?  As  for  the  youth  who  gave  to  Misery  all  he  had, 
a  tear,  and  gained  from  Heaven,  'twas  all  he  wish'd,  a 
fiicnd,  no  schoolboy  ever  understood  that  transaction." 

The  effort  to  force  a  child  on  to  a  plane 
not  his  own  is  thus  condemned  in  an  editorial 
utterance  of  The  School  Journal. 

"  The  mistake  is  frequently  made  of  assigning  subjects 
for  compositions  that  lie  outside  of  the  pupil's  range  of 
experience  and  vision.  A  premium  is  thereby  put  upon 
shallowness  in  thought  and  superficiality  of  judgment. 
It  is  a  way  of  making  the  children  hypocrites  by  having 
them  talk  or  write  of  things  they  know  nothing  about. 
Every  great  educator  from  Comenius  down  to  our  day 
has  raised  his  voice  against  what  Basedow  terms  •  per- 
nicious word  culture.'  " 

Girls  just  in  their  teens  are  sometimes  re- 
quired to  write  compositions  on  society  or 
other  topics  upon  which  school  children  should 
have  no  opportunity  of  forming  an  opinion. 
The  Baroness  Buelow  quotes  Froebel  as  say- 
ing, "The  instruction  forced  upon  the  child's 
mind  which  does  not  correspond  to  its  inner 
stage    of    development    and    its    measure    of 


MISSING    THE    POINT.  9 1 

power,  robs  him  of  his  own  original  view  of 
things,  and,  with  it,  of  his  greatest  power  and 
capacity  to  impress  the  stamp  of  his  own  in- 
dividuality upon  his  being.  Hence  arises  a 
departure  from  nature  which  leads  to  cari- 
cature." 

Referring  also  to  what  was  quoted  in  the 
previous  chapter  on  the  differing  environ- 
ments and  experiences  of  the  city  and  the 
country  child,  it  is  well  to  ask  how  far  the 
Twenty-third  Psalm  is  fairly  adapted  to  a  city 
child  of  six  who  has  never  seen  a  flock  of 
sheep,  much  less  an  Eastern  shepherd  ! 
Apropos  of  this  the  distinguished  Orientalist, 
Canon  Tristram,  says: 

"  If  the  abundant  imagery  of  Scripture,  taken  from 
pastoral  life,  contains  so  many  allusions  foreign  to  what 
we  see  in  the  tending  of  flocks  in  our  own  country,  how 
much  more  difficult  must  these  allusions  be  to  those  who 
know  nothing  of  flocks,  and  never  saw  a  sheep  ?  I  felt 
this  last  year,  when,  one  Sunday  in  Ceylon,  I  was  ad- 
dressing, through  an  interpreter,  a  large  congregation  of 
native  Christians,  and  unfortunately  chose  the  subject 
of  the  good  shepherd.  My  interpreter  told  me  after- 
ward that  not  one  of  my  hearers  had  ever  seen  a  sheep, 


92        POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

or  knew  what  it  was.  '  How,  then,  did  you  explain 
what  I  said?'  I  asked.  'Oh! 'he  replied,  'I  turned 
it  into  a  buffalo  that  had  lost  its  calf,  and  went  into  the 
jungle  to  find  it.'  " 

This  interpreter  probably  knew  nothing  of 
the  science  of  teaching,  and  yet  he  had  an  in- 
stinctive sense  of  the  principle  of  the  point  of 
contact  on  the  plane  of  experience.  Is  there 
not  a  suggestion  here  for  us  .'' 

Another  way  of  frequently  missing  the 
point  and  so  compelling  children  to  express 
adult  sentiments  and  feelings  entirely  foreign 
to  the  plane  of  child  life  is  found  in  some  of 
the  hymns  they  are  asked  to  sing.  Mrs. 
George  Archibald  says  : 

"  There  is  good  sense,  as  well  as  fervent  joy  and  full 
assurance,  in  the  verse  which  says  : 

•  Come,  sing  to  me  of  heaven, 
^\^len  I'm  about  to  die; 
Sing  songs  of  holy  ecstasy 
To  waft  my  soul  on  high. 

There'll  be  no  sorrow  there,'  etc. 

But,  as  children  are  not,  ordinarily,  about  to  die,  shall 
their  s'^vritual  songs  be  principally  about  heaven,  and 


MISSING    THE    POINT.  93 

expressive  of  an  intense  longing  to  go  there  ?  Yet, 
when  we  take  pains  to  notice,  we  find  in  Sunday-school 
hymns  a  vast  amount  of  rime,  time,  tune,  and  measure  de- 
voted to  chanting  the  desolation  of  life,  the  longing  for 
death,  and  a  submissive  waiting  for  release  and  glory. 
What  could  be  more  unnatural  ? 

"  The  child's  first  effort  is  toward  the  continuance  of  its 
earthly  existence.  The  mother's  first  care  has  the  same 
object.  The  first  warnings  of  the  infant  are  those  against 
dangers  that  might  imperil  its  life, — the  flame,  the  edge- 
tool,  the  flight  of  stairs.  Its  first  work  at  school  is  as  a 
foundation  for  the  needs  of  the  terrestrial  sojourn.  And 
its  first  spiritual  teaching  should  be  that  of  active  good- 
ness, and  cheerful,  kindly  Christian  endeavor  in  the 
sphere  to  which  it  is  born. 

•"The  home  of  the  soul'  may  often  fitly  be  the  goal 
of  adult  longing.  But  the  first  home  of  the  soul  is  the 
natural  body.  Let  the  children  learn  to  magnify  the 
offices  of  this  body.  Let  their  songs  be  those  which 
will  inspire  their  souls  to  use  the  lips,  the  hands  and  feet. 
In  the  service  of  man,  as  the  children  of  God." 

Think  of  a  primary  school  being  taught  to 
sing: 

"  Art  thou  weary,  art  thou  languid. 
Art  thou  sore  distressed  ? 
'  Come  to  me,'  saith  one,  '  and  coming, 
Be  at  rest.' 


94        POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

"  If  I  Still  hold  closely  to  him. 
What  hath  he  at  last  ? 
'  Sorrow  vanquished,  labor  ended, 
Jordan  passed.'  " 

The  child's  plane  may  be  spiritually  quite  as 
elevated  as  that  of  the  adult,  but  the  mode  of  the 
child's  spiritual  self-expression  will  be  different. 

There  is  another  way  of  forcing  an  entrance 
to  the  child's  mind  at  an  unnatural  and  dan- 
gerous point.  Doubters,  agnostics,  skeptics, 
or  infidels,  are  not  found  in  early  childhood. 
When  children  inquire,  they  do  it  because 
they  want  to  know  more,  not  because  they 
doubt.  It  is  therefore  a  fatal  mistake  to  ad- 
dress the  child  as  if  he  were  a  skeptic. 

A  discerning  student  of  the  child,  a  pri- 
mary worker.  Miss  Lida  B.  Robertson,  says: 
"Jesus  is  'the  way,  the  truth,  and  the  life,' 
and  our  teachings  of  him  should  be  positive, 
and  not  negative.  We  do  him  and  the  pu- 
pils irremediable  harm  to  fill  their  embryo 
minds  with  the  accursed  doubts  of  scribes, 
Pharisees,  and  Sadducees,  in  order  that  we 
may  try  to  prove  the  truth  to  them." 


MISSING   THE    POINT.  95 

Even  if  a  child  has  unfortunately  been  in 
an  unbelieving  environment,  and  so  may  be 
said  to  have  had  some  experience  with  that 
phase  of  life,  points  of  contact  with  it  are 
not  to  be  taken  merely  because  they  seem  to 
touch  his  experience.  Observe,  this  ruling 
is  not  arbitrary,  but  is  based  largely  on  the 
fact  that  unbelief  is  not  on  a  plane  natural  to 
the  condition  of  childhood.  Skepticism,  if 
it  can  be  found  in  a  little  child,  has  been  re- 
ceived through  suggestion  from  without,  and 
is  therefore  abnormal  and  premature.  Any 
suggestion  of  unbelief  is  liable  to  beget  unbe- 
lief. It  is  time  enough  to  deal  with  it  later, 
when  it  is  begotten. 

It  remains  now  to  show  how  the  point  of 
contact  with  child  experience  is  often  missed 
though  the  misuse  of  objects  or  "  symbols  " 
which  do  not  symbolize.  I  quote  at  length 
from  an  address  on  this  subject  by  Miss  Anna 
W.  Williams,  the  Superintendent  of  Public 
Kindergartens  in  Philadelphia.     She  says  : 

"  The  object  or  '  symbol,'  as  it  is  falsely  called,  as 
generally  applied  in  Sunday-school,  docs  not  give  a  child 


96        POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

a  clearer  vision  of  truth,  but  rather  leads  him  away  from 
it.  We  confuse  the  application  of  symbol  to  the  adult 
and  the  child's  interpretation  of  it.  Symbolism  to  the 
adult  is  the  representation  of  spiritual  truth  by  means  of 
material  things;  to  the  child  the  symbol  stands  for  an 
object.  For  instance,  '  Thy  word  is  a  lamp  unto  my 
feet,  and  a  light  unto  my  path,'  referred  to  the  custom 
of  wearing  lamps  on  the  feet  to  prevent  the  bite  of  ser- 
pents, and  to  avoid  other  dangers.  This  illustration  is 
meaningless  to  any  human  being,  whether  adult  or  child, 
who  has  not  felt  the  guidance  of  God's  word  in  a  dark 
hour  of  life,  and  the  need  of  such.  A  child  must  have 
the  experience  before  he  can  interpret  the  symbol. 
Showing  him  a  foot  with  a  lamp  on  it  does  not  give  ex- 
perience, which  is  the  essential  element  of  the  story  ;  it 
simply  tells  him  the  method  of  lighting  the  path  in  Ori- 
ental countries. 

"  Let  me  recapitulate.  The  idea  must  be  gained 
through  life  experience,  through  feeling,  before  the  sym- 
bol means  anything.  '  If  thine  eye  offend  thee,  pluck  it 
out,  and  cast  it  from  thee.'  No  child  could  feei  the 
meaning  of  this  figure  of  speech,  since  he  has  had  no 
life  experience  of  gangrenous  sickness  and  the  corrupt- 
ing power  of  sin.  Children  do  not  look  beyond  the  im- 
mediate sin,  while  the  adult  does  realize  the  mass  of  cor- 
rupting evil  that  grows  from  what  we  call  '  minor  sins,' 
such  as  speaking  ill  of  one's  neighbors,  leading  to 
greater  sin,  such  as  neglect  of  prayer. 

"A  child's  use  of  symbolism  is  a  totally  different  one. 
He  explains  one  thing  by  another  thing.     He  makes  a 


MISSING    THE    POINT.  97 

chair  (a  thing)  represent  a  train  of  cars  (another  thing), 
his  father's  cane  a  horse.  He  would  never  put  the  cane 
for  something  he  did  not  understand.  He  makes  one 
thing  he  understands  represent  another  thing  he  under- 
stands. For  instance,  he  would  never  of  himself  use  the 
spiritual  expression, «  My  soul  doth  magnify  the  Lord ' 
by  the  use  of  a  magnifying  glass  in  his  hand,  as  has  been 
done  in  illustrating  a  Sunday-school  lesson.  '  Magnify  ' 
— to  make  great,  larger  in  size  than  a  common  glass  can 
do — in  no  way  expresses  Mary's  feeling  of  exaltation  in 
the  greatness  and  loving-kindness  of  God,  and  the  honor 
given  to  her,  as  she  expresses  it  in  the  Magnificat.  .  .  . 

"  In  a  religious  paper  appeared  sixty  symbols  used  to 
illustrate  texts  of  Scripture.  I  will  quote  some  of  them, 
and  attempt  to  show  clearly  the  false  application. 

" '  A  pretty  lamp  with  no  oil  in  it,'  or  •  an  apple  with 
a  decayed  heart,'  for  '  man  looketh  on  the  outward  ap- 
pearance, but  the  Lord  looketh  on  the  heart.'  In  the 
first  place,  the  lamp  is  without  all  its  powers.  God  does 
not  make  us  without  ability  to  give  light ;  hence  it  is  not 
a  complete  symbol,  even  to  the  adult  mind. 

"  The  apple  with  the  fair  outside  and  rotten  centre  is 
beyond  a  little  child's  thought  in  regard  to  people.  He 
does  not  penetrate  in  this  analytic  way  into  others.  We 
teach  him,  if  we  teach  him  anything,  not  to  sit  on  a 
judgment-seat  in  regard  to  his  neighbors.  He  thinks 
people  mean  what  they  say,  are  what  they  appear  to  be. 
Having  a  fair  outside  and  a  bad  heart  is  not  a  part  of 
his  experience.  The  idea  of  the  hypocrisy  of  the  world 
does  not  belong  to  a  young  child's  mind.     Are  we  no' 


98        POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

suggesting  a  bad  motive  to  him  before  the  good  is 
firmly  established  ?  He  learns  that  fact  later  in  life 
from  his  own  experience,  and  the  learning  of  it  does  not 
make  him  a  better  man.  .  .  .  W'e  must  get  the  feeling 
of  the  love  of  God  thoroughly  impressed  by  presentation 
of  his  loving  side  before  wandering  from  him  will  give 
an  inward  pang. 

"  '  A  suit  of  silver  armor,'  for  '  Put  on  the  whole  armor 
of  God.'  One  serious  objection  to  this  silver  display  is 
that  the  armor  is  so  attractive  that  the  child's  attention 
is  called  from  the  thought  to  the  thing,  and  held  there. 
This  figure,  too,  comes  in  Ephesians,  which  represents 
the  high-water  mark  of  Paul's  experience,  and  requires 
the  richest  and  fullest  experience  of  Christian  culture  to 
apprehend  the  spiritual  application.  Let  me  repeat : 
the  attractiveness  of  the  object  chains  the  child's  atten- 
tion to  the  thing  rather  than  the  thought,  and  we  spend 
our  whole  lives  in  trying  to  spring  away  from  things  of 
sense  to  spiritual  things.  Such  display  materially  de- 
feats the  purpose  intended  to  be  accomplished. 

" '  A  paper  pattern  and  scissors '  for  Christ  our  pattern 
is  grossly  materialistic.  A  story  of  one  action  of  Christ's 
rife,  to  inculcate  the  thought  of  the  text,  would  be  in- 
finitely better.  The  child  may  understand  the  meaning 
of  the  wora  •  pattern '  better  by  means  of  this  concrete 
illustration,  but  surely  not  the  word  '  example,'  for 
which  it  stanas.  How  can  a  paper  pattern  represent 
holiness,  spirituality,  etc.  ?  It  associates  a  great  and 
holy  thing,  too,  with  an  external  triviality  of  life,  and 
sets  more  store  by  the  word  than  the  idea. 


MISSING    THE    POINT.  99 

"  Let  us  be  careful  that  our  Sunday-school  does  not 
drift  into  a  system  of  object  lessons  that  are  materializing 
the  child.  If  you  show  a  red  cardboard  cross  to-day, 
you  must  show  a  blue  one  on  the  succeeding  Sunday,  or 
some  other  more  enticing  object,  if  you  are  going  to 
draw  them  by  sense  attraction. 

"  May  it  not  be  possible,  with  such  methods  as  our 
Sunday-schools  are  adopting  to-day,  that  when  the  child 
reaches  maturity  he  may  have  a  contempt,  not  for  the 
teacher,  but  for  her  presentations  of  great  truths,  and, 
when  the  spiritual  light  dawns  on  him,  his  vision  may 
be  obscured  by  the  materialistic  view  of  his  childhood  ?  " 

It  is  not  merely  the  starting-points,  then, 
that  must  be  within  the  child's  range  of  ex- 
perience, but  it  is  the  whole  teaching  which 
proceeds  step  by  step  from  it.  This  means 
not  only  that  we  must  find  the  proper  points 
of  contact,  but  that  the  body  of  lesson  ma- 
terial itself  be  appropriately  selected  for  its 
simplicity,  positivity,  immediateness,  concrete- 
ness,  connectedness,  and  spiritual  suggestive- 
ness. 


V 

THE  LESSON  MATERIAL 


THE  LESSON  MATERIAL 

It  is  a  much  heralded  idea  among  Sunday- 
school  teachers  that  it  makes  little  or  no  dif- 
ference what  the  subject-matter  of  the  Bible- 
study  lesson  is,  provided  the  teacher  "  adapt  " 
it  to  the  children.  It  is  contended  that  the 
selection  of  uniform  lessons  for  pupils  of  all 
ages  is  quite  consistent  with  the  demand  for 
graded  instruction;  and  that  the  grading 
should  be,  not  in  the  subject-matter,  but  in 
the  method  of  its  impartation. 

We  shall  not  here  debate  the  question  as 
to  whether  "experience  "  has  proved  this  (as 
is  claimed)  or  not.  It  is,  indeed,  rather  a 
(]ucstion  of  what  the  child's  experience  is 
with  us,  than  ours  with  him,  and  the  trend  of 
evidences  in  the  foregoing  chapters  must  suf- 
fice. The  issue  which  I  make  is,  that  choice 
of    material    is    the    first    essential    and     the 

103 


104     POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

method  of  presenting  the  material  comes  sec^ 
ond.  Child  nature  and  individual  interests 
are  the  real  choosers. 

Some  Scripture  passages  are  certainly  bet> 
ter  for  some  purposes  than  others.  Now  the 
little  child  is  a  very  different  sort  of  purpose 
from  the  man  or  woman  or  the  youth.  It  is 
therefore  quite  reasonable  to  suppose  that 
some  Scripture  lessons  would  be  better  than 
others  for  a  child. 

No  teacher  more  carefully  selected  his  ma- 
terial according  to  his  pupils'  plane  of  expe- 
rience than  our  Lord.  As  has  been  shown, 
Jesus  went  to  the  people  at  their  point  of 
contact  with  life,  and,  though  a  carpenter,  he 
never  drew  a  figure  from  his  own  calling,  but 
from  theirs.  In  The  Biblical  World,  Lincoln 
Owen  well  says  : 

"  In  all  phases  of  intellectual  education  we  recognize 
an  intimate  connection  between  tiling,  idea,  and  word  ; 
in  more  general  terms,  between  reality,  tliought,  and 
language.  Word  and  language  cannot  have  for  the 
child  appropriate  meaning  until  he  has  the  appropriate 
experience.  Hence,  it  is  a  psychological  necessity  to 
Start  with    the  child's  experiences;  to  make  indefinite 


TKE    LESSON    MA'' ERIAL.  IO5 

and  chaotic  experiences  definite  and  oiderly  ;  to  supply 
pattern  experiences ;  to  connect  his  experiences  with  the 
appropriate  language.  The  teacher  may  begin  at  either 
end  of  the  series,  but  progress  and  clearness  require  that 
the  entire  series  be  mastered.  Much  indefinite  and 
hazy  work  results  from  the  wordiness  of  instruction. 
The  constant  problem  in  teaching  children  is  to  make 
language  significant.  In  the  Sunday-school  there  seems 
to  be  a  necessity  to  start  with  the  language  end  of  the 
series,  and  much  of  the  verbal  instruction  there  fails  to 
get  associated  with  any  experience,  and  is  accordingly 
faulty." 

But  apart  from  this,  if  we  recognize  the 
right  of  each  child  to  his  individuality,  we 
should  recognize  the  right  of  childhood  to  its 
individuality.  It  seems  almost  humiliating  to 
plead  for  a  truth  so  well  understood  in  every 
other  sphere  except  that  of  Sunday-school  in- 
struction. Would  any  sensible  parent  con- 
sent to  send  his  children  to  a  secular  primary 
school  where  there  was  no  choice  of  lesson 
material,  but  where  any  and  every  subject, 
however  abstruse  and  remote  from  the  child's 
plane  of  thought,  was  ordered  to  be  "  adapted  " 
by  the  teacher.?  Such  "adaptation"  as  one 
often    sees    is    a  misnomer.     It  results  in  a 


I06     POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

nominal  instruction,  but  not  real  teaching  of 
the  essential  truth  involved  in  the  assigned 
text. 

If  it  be  claimed  that  any  and  every  text  in 
the  Bible  is  suitable  for  the  children  provided 
it  be  suitably  "  adapted  "  by  the  teacher,  I  let 
the  words  of  Pestalozzi  answer  :  "  The  re- 
form needed  is  not  that  the  school  coach 
should  be  better  horsed,  but  that  it  should  be 
turned  right  around  and  started  on  a  new 
track." 

The  turning  around  will  be  the  adoption 
of  material  selected  especially  from  the  child's 
point  of  view,  as  well  as  the  ordering  of  the 
services  and  the  mode  of  address  to  the  child 
upon  his  own  plane  of  sense,  thought,  and 
feeling.  In  fact,  this  latter — feeling — is  one 
of  the  neglected  aims  in  early  education. 
The  filling  of  the  child  mind  with  "  infor- 
mation "  is  a  small  service  to  humanity  com- 
pared with  the  education  of  the  feelings. 
The  primary  school  that  begets  reverence 
alone  has  done  a  large  work.  Appreciation 
and   affection   must  precede   formal  thought. 


THE    LESSON    MATERIAL.  IO7 

The  needs,  desires,  purposes,  pains,  and 
pleasures  of  a  horse,  a  cat,  a  fly,  a  flower, 
antedate  in  the  child's  heart  the  knowledge 
of  their  anatomy  in  the  child's  mind.  It  is 
better  to  lead  a  child  to  love  a  tree  than  to 
calculate  the  lumber  in  it.  Professor  Martin 
G.  Brumbaugh,  of  Pennsylvania,  suggestively 
says: 

"John  James  Audubon  had  his  boyhood  home  in  a 
cave  on  the  banks  of  the  Perkiomen  creek,  in  Mont- 
gomery County.  It  was  here  that  his  soul  was  tilled 
with  rapturous  love  for  bird-life.  It  was  this  love  that 
led  him  for  a  quarter  of  a  century  into  the  secret  haunts 
of  humming-bird  and  oriole.  First  an  artist,  then  a 
scientist.  It  was  self-directed  research  after  his  own 
plan,  investigation  prompted  of  love,  that  made  possible 
the  growth  into  the  first  ornithologist  of  America,  per- 
haps of  the  world.  And  this  is  typical  of  the  process 
in  each  life.  It  is  a  great  moment  in  a  boy's  life  when 
he  first  meets  in  the  world  of  things  the  object  for  which 
his  soul  yearned — when  he  finds  the  things  he  loves  and 
the  things  that  link  him  lovingly  to  the  great  world 
without.  A  pupil  of  mine,  dull  and  listless  in  his  work 
for  a  year,  was  finally  persuaded  by  his  teacher  to  study 
botany.  He  did  his  text-book  work  in  an  indifferent 
and  listless  manner.  Early  in  June,  on  a  rainy  after- 
noon, he  accompanied  his  class  to  a  private  haunt  of  the 


I08     POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

orchid  family.  Here  the  boy  unexpectedly  found  a  rare 
specimen,  and,  throwing  himself  upon  the  wet  ground 
beside  the  beautiful  flower,  wept  for  joy,  and,  between 
his  sobs,  called  alternately  to  his  teacher  and  his  God  in 
his  moment  of  supreme  exaltation.  That  boy  found  the 
thing  he  loved.  He  loved  all  its  associates,  and  be- 
came one  of  the  best  botanists  Juniata  College  ever  pro- 
duced." 

Perhaps  some  one  urges  that  we  do  not 
bring  the  boys  to  Sunday-school  to  teach  them 
to  become  botanists.  No.  But  this  boy  was 
dull  and  listless  as  many  a  Sunday-school  pupil 
is  listless.  The  Bible  is  made  to  stand  between 
him  and  life  as  this  teacher's  text-book  stood 
between  his  pupil  and  life.  Bible  words,  like 
all  other  words,  must  find  their  interpretation 
in  experience.  There  must  have  been  an 
experience  in  the  child's  life  to  interpret  them 
and  use  them  before  they  can  be  efficient  in 
the  child's  spiritual  education  and  life.  Hence 
the  need  of  a  wise  choice  of  the  lesson  ma- 
terial if  we  would  have  it  educative  instead 
of  arrestive  of  development. 

Miss  Blow,  speaking  deprecatingly  of  the 
lack  of  clear  insight  in  the  choice  of  themes, 


THE    LESSON    MATERIAL.  lOQ 

says  :  "  It  would  seem  that  the  selection  of 
suitable  themes  is  a  matter  of  prime  import." 
And  a  writer  in  The  Westminster  Review 
says  :  "  What  is  true  of  bodily  food  is  true 
also  of  spiritual  food.  Children's  intellects 
cannot  digest  that  which  is  suited  to  adults; 
and  however  sincerely  religious  beliefs  may 
be  held  by  parents,  this  does  not  prevent  them 
from  assuming  a  different  complexion  in  the 
mind  of  a  child.  At  second  hand  they  are 
not  merely  useless,  but  pernicious."  And 
Inspector  Hughes  of  Toronto :  "  No  greater 
wrong  can  be  inflicted  on  a  child  than  to  try 
to  make  it  exhibit  the  characteristics  of  the 
religious  life  of  maturity  either  in  profession 
or  practice.  The  only  certain  product  of 
such  training  is  a  hypocrite."  And  Frocbcl : 
"  We  should  not  forget  that  instruction  should 
start  from  the  pupil's  own  life  and  proceed 
from  it  like  a  bud  or  sprout." 

Says  Herbert  Spencer:  "Good  exposition 
implies  much  constructive  imagination.  A 
prerequisite  is  the  forming  of  true  ideas  of 
the    mental    states    of   those  who    arc  to  be 


no     POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

taught ;  and  a  further  prerequisite  is  the  im- 
agining of  methods  by  which,  beginning  with 
conceptions  which  they  possess,  there  may  be 
built  up  in  their  minds  the  conceptions  they 
do  not  possess.  Of  constructive  imagina- 
tion, as  displayed  in  this  sphere,  men  at  large 
appear  to  be  almost  devoid ;  as  witness  the 
absurd  systems  of  teaching  which  in  past 
times,  and  in  large  measure  at  present,  have 
stupefied,  and  still  stupefy,  children." 

Says  Louis  Heilprin :  "We  teach  a  child 
to  bound  every  state  in  the  world,  and  make 
him  learn  all  the  capitals,  before  he  has  the 
slightest  interest  in  land  that  he  has  not  seen. 
We  teach  him  to  locate  a  long  array  of  capes 
and  promontories  without  his  having  any 
conception  of  their  significance  as  land- 
marks. .  .  .  We  drag  him  from  one  corner 
to  another  of  the  great  tableau  of  history, 
and  compel  him  to  take  in  its  insignificant 
details  before  he  has  been  given  a  chance  to 
acquire  any  interest  in  any  age  but  his  own." 

And  Professor  Jackman,  in  The  School 
Journal,  with  great  acuteness  says : 


THE    LESSON    MATERIAL.  Ill 

"The  child's  pictures  of  a  great  flat,  and  perfectly 
motionless,  earth,  and  of  the  sun,  a  relatively  small  bur- 
nished disk,  daily  traversing  the  sky,  just  out  of  reach 
of  the  birds,  have  all  been  so  honestly  earned  that  it 
seems  almost  wrong  to  undeceive  him.  As  the  subject 
is  usually  presented  in  the  common  schools,  there  is  no 
excuse  for  the  attempt  that  is  made  to  disturb  his  early 
impressions.  The  teacher's  first  act  is  to  smite  him  with 
the  statement  that  the  earth  is  round ;  then,  in  exchange 
for  the  pupil's  earth — with  all  its  flatness,  still  a  world 
of  bewildering  beauty  and  intense  interest — the  teacher 
presents  him  with  a  six-inch  pasteboard  globe  and  bids 
him  think  on  that.  It  is  a  barter  which  the  soul  of  the 
pupil  never  sanctions,  and  the  result  is  that  although  he 
ever  after  dutifully  says :  '  The  earth  is  round  like  a 
globe  or  ball,'  the  picture  of  the  dear  o\(\Jlat  earth  of  his 
childhood  forever  remains  as  the  actual  basis  of  all  his 
geographic  thinking. 

"  The  fact  is,  the  pupil  will  never  exchange  his  flat 
earth  of  actual  experience  for  the  pasteboard  globe  of  the 
teacher's  desk ;  nay,  he  will  not  trade  it  for  the  round 
earth  itself  until,  through  an  equally  actual  experience, 
the  latter  gradually  fills  up  as  a  great  picture  and  lays 
hold  of  his  imagination  and  his  life  as  did  the  one  of  his 
early  years.  Whatever  may  be  in  the  child's  experience 
when  he  enters  school,  whether  right  or  wrong,  the 
teacher  may  rest  assured  that  usually  it  has  been  acquired 
through  honest  growth ;  if  education  is  to  correct  or 
expand  this  experience,  it  can  be  done  only  through 
processes  of  growth  just  as  gradual  and  equally  genuine. 


112     POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

"  It  is,  tlierefore,  a  serious  task  for  him  who  seeks  to 
disrupt  the  child's  experience  by  teaching  him  that  the 
earth  is  round;  that  it  is  flying  through  space  nearly 
nineteen  miles  every  second.  .  .  .  Facts  which  actually 
subvert  his  whole  experience  by  some  means  must  be 
made  to  appear  more  reasonable  than  the  very  things 
which  he  has  seen  before  his  own  eyes  all  his  life." 

So  far  as  geographical  and  historical  aspects 
go,  the  best  general  criticism  is  that  we  intro- 
duce them  too  early. 

All  this  fairly  pictures  our  tendency,  in  all 
dealings  with  the  child,  to  keep  him  in  the 
remote  instead  of  the  near,  and  in  minor 
details  to  him  disconnected  and  unrelated, 
instead  of  large  simple  generals  or  wholes, 
indigenous  to  his  plane  of  experience. 

It  will  not  do  to  show  the  weakness  and 
harmfulness  of  our  present  systems  without  in- 
dicating in  what  direction  reform  must  lie.  It 
is  not  my  part  or  purpose  to  work  out  the  details 
of  a  primary  Bible  course  or  program.  Nor  is 
it  essential  that  every  instructor,  in  order  to  be 
familiar  with  the  principle  of  the  point  of 
contact  and  the  plane  of  experience,  should 
be    expert     in     the     construction    of    lesson 


THE    LESSON    MATERIAL.  II3 

courses.  But  some  basal  suggestions,  some 
foundation  principles,  may  be  here  laid  down 
for  completeness'  sake. 

The  Bible  is  a  complex  of  abstracts  and 
concretes,  of  history,  biography,  poetry, 
ethics,  prophecy,  law,  doctrine,  etc.,  em- 
bracing also  many  bloody  and,  to  us,  revolt- 
ing historical  pictures,  altogether  unsuitable 
for  a  child's  reading.  It  is  therefore,  as  a 
text-book,  unique,  and  accordingly  difficult 
of  presentation.  The  result  is  that  our 
instruction  courses  are  likewise  too  full  and 
complex.  There  is  too  much  formal  "  teach- 
ing." Dr.  W.  T.  Harris  says :  "  It  is 
believed  that  arrested  development  of  the 
higher  mental  and  moral  faculties  is  caused 
in  many  cases  by  the  school.  The  habit  of 
teaching  with  too  much  thoroughness  and 
too  long-continued  drill  the  semi-mechanical 
branches  of  study,  such  as  arithmetic,  spell- 
ing, the  discrimination  of  colors,  the  obser- 
vation of  surface  and  solid  forms,  and  even 
the    distinctions    of    formal    grammar,   often 


114     POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

leaves  the  pupil  fixed  in  lower  stages  of 
growth  and  unable  to  exercise  the  higher 
functions  of  thought."  It  will  be  urged  that 
this  does  not  apply  to  religious  work  as  these 
branches  are  not  taught  in  Sunday-schools. 
But  a  candid  investigation  of  much  of  the 
drill  of  the  Sunday-school  will  disclose  an 
alarming  aptness  in  Dr.  Harris's  words. 

Beginning  where  we  find  the  pupil,  then, 
we  must  take  a  (ew  near-at-hand  points  in 
the  child's  experience, — objects,  or  activities 
in  the  home,  in  nature,  parental  and  filial 
relations,  etc.  These  must  be  combined 
or  thought  into  a  simple,  easily-conceived 
whole.     Froebel,  speaking  of  the  family,  says : 

"  This  feeling  of  community,  first  uniting  the  child 
with  mother,  father,  brothers,  and  sisters,  and  resting  on 
a  higher  spiritual  unity,  to  which  later  on  is  added  the 
unmistakable  discovery  that  father,  mother,  brothers, 
sisters,  human  beings  in  general,  feel  and  know  them- 
selves to  be  in  community  and  unity  with  a  higher  prin- 
ciple— with  humanity,  with  God — this  feeling  of  com- 
munity is  the  very  first  germ  of  all  true  religious  spirit, 
of  all  genuine  yearning  for  unhindered  unification  with 
the  eternal,  with  God." 


THE    LESSON    MATERIAL.  II5 

But  what  of  children  of  depraved  and 
cruel  parents  ?  Manifestly  home  is  not  the 
starting-point  for  such  a  child's  reach  to  a 
Heavenly  Father.  But  somewhere  the  child 
will  have  found  a  chum,  a  friend,  a  human 
helper,  as  a  germ  for  the  larger  feeling  toward 
the  Divine  Friend  and  Parent. 

We  must  observe  peoples  before  we  talk 
about  "a  peculiar  people,"  "the  chosen 
people."  "The  simplest  general  whole," 
says  Colonel  Parker,  is  the  "  first  objective 
point,"  And  "  the  plain  rule  of  procedure, 
in  going  from  the  part  to  the  whole,  is  to 
form  a  real  whole  that  can  be  most  easily 
imagined  or  appreciated.  .  .  .  The  anatomy 
of  a  finger  or  a  muscle  is  more  difficult  than  the 
anatomy  of  the  entire  framework  of  the  body." 
A  child  understands  sentences  and  phrases  of 
which  he  does  not  understand  the  isolated 
words.  He  can  swing  his  arms  mightily, 
albeit  he  cannot  control  his  fingers  precisely. 

Pursuing  the  germinal  idea  of  dependent 
and  affectionate  personal  relations  we  ap- 
proach the   idea   of  Creator   and    Father   of 


Il6     POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHINCJ. 

all.  Next  we  might  aim  for  the  concept  of 
communication  through  the  simple  percepts 
of  speech,  books,  etc. ;  then  a  great  simple, 
general  whole  again,  a  concept  of  prayer,  or 
of  revelation, — the  Bible.  The  way  is  thus 
naturally  and  logically  opened  for  the  later 
revelation  of  God  in  human  form, — the 
Word  "made  flesh."  (All  the  steps  that 
this  paragraph  implies  cannot,  of  course,  be 
detailed  here.  Nor  is  it  meant  to  say  that 
this  is  the  only  course,  but  rather  that  it  is  the 
only  right  principle  of  beginning  and  of  pro- 
ceeding,— from  the  known  or,  better,  the 
already  felt  interest  to  the  unknown.)  But 
we  must  not  go  too  fast  in  working  out 
such  a  program.  Repetition,  constant  and 
frequent,  is  essential.  Here  is  where  the 
present  International  lesson  system  fails  sadly 
with  young  children,  and  indeed  the  same  is 
true  of  most  other  systems  of  Bible  lessons. 
It  were  better  to  use  the  same  Bible  story 
twelve  times  over  than  to  have  twelve  stories 
with  no  repetition.  The  same  story  should 
be  varied  in  mode  at  each  telling,  giving  the 


THE    LESSON    MATERIAL.  II7 

child  the  opportunity  of  discovery  of  the 
identity.  Observe  also  that  even  this  simple 
program  is  liable  to  be  worked  out  too 
speedily  into  mere  thought  forms  instead  of 
addressing  itself  to  the  feelings.  Appre- 
ciations and  affections,  attitudes  of  being  in- 
stead of  movements  toward  knowing,  imaged 
ideals  for  willing — these  are  the  goal. 

Recalling  again  that  young  children  have 
very  little  idea  of  time  and  space,  we  must 
consequently  avoid  much  dependence  upon 
interests  rooted  in  them.  It  is  useless  to 
take  children  step  by  step  from  Egypt  to  the 
Promised  Land  until  they  have  a  compre- 
hensive view,  a  simple  idea  of  Israel  (whether 
we  call  it  "  Israelites,"  "  Hebrews,"  "Jews," 
"  peculiar  people,"  or  any  other  name)  from 
Abraham  to  the  modern  Jew.  The  complex 
of  historical  details  within  that  view  cannot 
be  appreciated.  *'The  fatal  mistake,"  says 
Colonel  Parker,  "  of  many  teachers  ...  is 
that  of  leading  pupils  into  the  search  for  (to 
the  teachers)  alluring  details,  instead  of  teach- 
ing just  enough  of  facts  to  subserve  the  pur- 


Il8     POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

poses  of  clear  and  simple  generalizations." 
Creeping  week  by  week  from  the  Creation 
to  Joshua  or  David  or  Zerubbabel  is  utterly 
futile  if  the  intention  is  to  be  historical  or 
chronological.  Herbart  observes  that  the  im- 
pression of  the  present  moment  throws  the 
one  previously  apprehended  too  quickly  below 
the  threshold  of  consciousness. 

Moreover,  the  distracting  details  are  a  seri- 
ous interference  with  the  child's  generalizing 
powers.  There  is  no  implication  here  that 
children  do  not  feel  great  religious  truths. 
But  I  mean  to  emphasize  the  difference  be- 
tween the  simple  and  the  complex,  between 
the  high  and  the  intricate.  Hawthorne  saw 
that  "  children  possess  an  unestimated  sensi- 
bility to  whatever  is  deep  or  high,  in  imagi- 
nation or  feeling,  so  long  as  it  is  simple  like- 
wise. It  is  only  the  artificial  and  the  com- 
plex that  bewilder  them."  Dr.  Nicholas 
Murray  Butler  finely  says  that  "  the  highest 
and  most  enduring  knowledge  is  of  the  things 
of  the  spirit.  That  subtle  sense  of  the  beau- 
tiful   and    the    sublime    which    accompanies 


THE    LESSON    MATERIAL.  II9 

spiritual  insight,  and  is  part  of  it, — this  is  the 
highest  achievement  of  which  humanity  is 
capable.  It  is  typified,  in  various  forms,  in 
the  verse  of  Dante,  and  the  prose  of  Thomas 
a  Kempis,  in  the  Sistine  Madonna  of  Raphael, 
and  in  Mozart's  Requiem.  To  develop  this 
sense  in  education  is  the  task  of  art  and  lit- 
erature, to  interpret  it  is  the  work  of  philos- 
ophy, and  to  nourish  it  the  function  of  reli- 
gion." The  child  is  born  on  the  highway 
to  this  "highest  achievement."  Let  us  not 
block  this  way  by  a  meddlesome  multiplicity 
of  words,  words,  words. 

Again,  we  must  have  always  in  mind  a 
simple  idea  of  personal  and  loving  relations, 
centring  in  the  God-ward.  Here  the  value 
of  Bible  stories  is  very  positive.  They  lead 
pupils  to  put  themselves  in  the  place  of 
others,  and  to  look  for  causes  and  conse- 
quences. If  they  touch  the  child's  experi- 
ence, and  arouse  his  curiosity,  they  educate 
memory,  quicken  desire,  enforce  moral,  sug- 
gest standards,  become  a  basis  of  action  in  the 
pursuit  of  ideals,  and  so  develop  character. 


I20     POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

The  Stories  must,  however,  be  wisely 
selected,  and,  as  already  shown,  they  must 
be  repeated.  The  continuous  depicting  of 
bloodshed  and  horrors  in  the  illustrations 
given  in  certain  Bible  story-books  for  chil- 
dren, is  simply  barbarous.  A  child  should 
not  get  as  a  dominant  thought  of  God  the 
idea  of  retribution,  of  killing,  warring,  etc.  I 
know  of  a  little  child  who  was  overheard  tell- 
ing a  companion  that  she  didn't  believe  "that 
story  about  the  ark  because  she  knew  God 
would  never  drown  people  that  way."  Nor 
ought  early  impressions  of  God's  Book  to 
consist  mainly  of  such  things  as  are  repellent 
to  a  sensitive  nature,  especially  in  its  most 
impressible  period.  The  child  cannot  have 
sufficient  knowledge  of  situations  and  of  socio- 
logical  conditions  to  justify  a  repeated  exhibit 
of  vengeance  and  horror.  For  like  reason 
the  physical  sufferings  of  our  Lord  on  the 
cross  must  not  be  too  minutely  pictured,  and 
his  death  ought  seldom  to  be  mentioned  apart 
from  his  rising  again.  Then,  too,  the  stories 
must  have  a  certain  simple  completeness  of 


THE    LESSON    MATERIAL.  121 

their  own,  and  not  be  too  dependent  on  re- 
mote causes  and  complications,  or  on  peculiar 
local  conditions. 

The  stories  must  have  in  them  that  which 
educates  and  stimulates  right  feeling,  which 
forms  ideals  and  leads  to  action.  The  story 
ought  to  do  this  itself — or,  more  accurately, 
the  pupil,  reacting  to  it,  does  it  himself.  In 
attempting  to  point  a  moral  the  teacher  usually 
strangles  the  ideal  at  its  birth  in  the  child's 
soul.  If  a  story  needs  much  moralizing  it 
were  better  not  told  at  all.  If  the  picture  of 
a  heroic  deed  touches  a  child's  natural  inter- 
est he  feels  the  ideal  born  within  him.  "What 
a  child  has  felt  he  never  forgets;  what  he  has 
merely  been  told  he  may  not  remember  five 
minutes,"  says  Alice  W.  Rollins.  And  In- 
spector Hughes  observes,  "  7  he  habit  of 
*  pointing  the  moral '  of  tale  or  incident  is  a 
kindred  error  to  the  practice  of  forcing  ma- 
ture theories  of  religion  or  adult  practices  on 
the  child."  Miss  Blow  notes  that  the  mind 
may  be  trusted  to  do  its  own  universalizing. 
While  it  is  true  that  no  point  of  contact,  or 


122     POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

Starting-point,  is  likely  to  be  equally  service- 
able for  all  members  of  a  heterogeneous  class 
alike,  it  is  also  true  that  the  moral  of  a  story 
will  differ  still  more  essentially  for  each  one 
who  hears  it.  Hence  the  impropriety  of 
dictating  the  "  application "  to  the  class  en 
masse.  One  lesson  the  primary  teachers  have 
yet  to  learn,  and  that  is  to  let  a  good  story  do 
its  own  work.  Better  say  too  little  than  too 
much. 

There  can  be  no  ideal  program  or  course 
of  lessons  for  all  alike.  Differences  of  con- 
dition among  schools,  and  among  the  pupils 
in  the  same  school,  forbid  it.  The  great 
variance  in  the  qualifications  of  teachers,  and 
the  power  of  old  associations,  predilections, 
and  prejudices,  forbid  it.  And  yet  there  is  a 
sense  in  which  there  can  be  a  course,  ideal  in 
its  recognition  of  these  difficulties,  and  in  its 
concessions  to  them.  At  the  very  least  the 
kindergarten  basis  of"  an  atmosphere  of  love  " 
together  with  "  training  in  good  habits,  such 
as  order,  obedience,  punctuality,  attention,  in- 
dustry " — as  Eleanore   Heerwart  puts  it — is 


THE    LESSON    MATERIAL.  1 23 

always  in  order.  To  this  1  may  add  the 
community  sense  which  the  kindergarten  so 
effectually  begets  in  the  child.  Yet  the  Sun- 
day-school is  not,  and  should  not  be  called,  a 
kindergarten,  in  any  grade. 

Recapitulating,  we  find  that,  in  teaching 
the  child,  child  nature  is  the  first  considera- 
tion ;  that  the  child  is  capable  of  feeling  cer- 
tain profound  spiritual  intimations,  although 
he  be  incapable  of  receiving  formal  truths 
through  a  conventional  adult  phraseology ; 
that  we  must  take  the  child  where  we  find 
him;  that  the  mind  feeds  only  upon  that 
which  it  assimilates  and  grows  onlv  through 
its  own  self-activity;  that  we  cannot  force 
this  assimilation  beyond  a  more  or  less  well- 
defined  power  of  the  child's  nature  ;  that  we 
must  proceed  from  experience-interests  to  an 
unknown  ;  that  from  the  concrete  the  pupil 
must  do  his  own  abstracting  and  proceed  to 
his  own  concrete  activity ;  that  we  must 
teach  by  wholes  rather  than  in  complications 
of  detail  ;  that  the  child  mind  has  little  power 
of  perceiving  matters  of  time  or  space,  and 


124     POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

consequently  can  assimilate  but  little  of  his- 
tory or  geography ;  that  the  connection  of 
one  lesson  with  another  must  be  a  connec- 
tion of  thought  and  feeling  rather  than  of  mere 
chronology  or  artifice  ;  that  the  narration  of 
things  painful  and  horrible  must  be  as  far  as 
possible  avoided  ;  that  Bible  and  other  stories 
have  an  important  pedagogical  value,  and  that 
instruction  must  be  positive  rather  than  nega- 
tive or  apologetic.  In  short,  teaching  is  en- 
abling another  to  restate  the  truth  in  terms  of 
his  own  life.  If  the  pupil  gives  back  only 
what  we  have  given  him  he  has  got  nothing. 
What  he  gives  out  in  words  or  action  must, 
sooner  or  later,  be  a  re-statement  of  the  truth 
in  terms  of  his  own  self-activity.  The 
teacher's  test  of  his  work  therefore  is  not  the 
test  of  a  parrot  but  of  a  self-actively  develop- 
ing soul. 

Any  one  who  has  attempted  to  build  up  a 
primary  course  in  which  the  foregoing  prin- 
ciples have  been  fairly  respected,  will  have 
discovered  that,  if  he  can  construct  one  such 
course,  he  can  about  as  satisfactorily  construct 


THE    LESSON    MATERIAL.  1 25 

more.  He  will  have  found  himself,  at  times, 
in  a  strait  betwixt  two  paths  through  Primary 
Land.  He  comes  now  and  again  to  a  parting 
of  ways,  both  or  all  equally  primary,  equally 
promising,  all  trending  toward  the  same  goal. 
The  resources  arc  great  and  varied. 

The  truth  is  that  life  is  the  only  real  in- 
terpreter and  educator.  Our  Sunday-schools 
like  our  day  schools  are  too  bookish — too 
much  a  thing  apart  from  life  relations,  too 
little  a  thing  of  atmosphere  and  attitude  and 
Christian  endeavor.  What  Professor  Dewey 
says  of  the  secular  school  is  not  inapt  here. 

"From  the  standpoint  of  the  child,  the  great  waste  in 
the  school  comes  from  his  inability  to  utilize  his  experi- 
ences he  gets  outside  the  school  in  any  complete  and  free 
way  within  the  school  itself;  while  on  the  other  hand  he 
is  unable  to  apply  in  daily  life  what  he  is  learning  at 
school.  That  is  the  isolation  of  the  school — its  isolation 
from  life.  When  the  child  gets  into  the  schoolroom  he 
has  to  put  out  of  his  mind  a  large  part  of  the  ideas,  in- 
terests, and  activities  that  predominate  in  his  home  and 
neighborhood.  So  the  school  being  unable  to  utilize 
this  everyday  experience,  sets  painfully  to  work  on  an- 
other tack,  and  by  a  variety  of  means,  to  arouse  in  the 
child  an  interest  iii  school  studies.     While  1  was  visiting 


126  POINT  OF  CONTACT  IN  TEACHING. 

in  the  city  of  Moline  a  few  years  ago,  the  superintendent 
told  me  that  they  found  many  children  every  year  who 
were  surprised  to  learn  that  the  Mississippi  River  in  the 
text-book  had  anything  to  do  with  the  stream  of  water 
flowing  past  their  homes." 

How  many  children  that  recite  the  Beati- 
tudes or  the  penitential  Psalms  realize  that 
they  have  anything  to  do  with  the  stream  of 
human  lives  that  passes  by  their  home  doors  ? 
Again  : 

"  The  child  comes  to  the  traditional  school  with  a 
healthy  body  and  a  more  or  less  unwilling  mind,  though, 
in  fact,  he  does  not  bring  both  his  body  and  mind  with 
him ;  he  has  to  leave  his  mind  behind,  because  there  is 
no  way  to  use  it  in  the  school.  If  he  had  a  purely  ab- 
stract mind,  he  could  bring  it  to  school  with  him,  but  his 
is  a  concrete  one,  interested  in  concrete  things,  and  un- 
less these  things  get  over  into  school  life,  he  cannot  take 
his  mind  with  him." 

This  is  written  about  the  secular  school, 
but  its  application,  in  a  degree  at  least,  to  the 
Sunday-school,  is  apparent.  It  must  be  more 
closely  coordinated  with,  or  related  to,  life. 
It  must  depend  less  upon  mere  verbal  mem- 
orizing and  forms  of  philosophic  thought  and 


THE    LKi^bON    MATKKIAL.  1 27 

Statement  which  cannot  be  carried  over  into 
daily  living. 

The  Book  of  Genesis  is  not  genesis  to  the 
child.  Daylight  comes  before  the  sun.  If 
we  think  we  can  teach  the  child  the  Bible 
best  in  what,  to  an  adult,  is  consecutive  order, 
because  it  is  literary  order  or  historical  order, 
we  deceive  ourselves.  We  are  not  bringing 
the  child  the  truth  in  his  orderly  way,  even  if 
it  is  ours.  Connection  and  order  to  us  are 
not  necessarily  order  or  connection  to  him. 

The  true  primary  course  progresses  by 
topics,  through  concrete  imagery,  logically, — 
not  by  book,  chronologically.  The  life  ex- 
perience of  the  child  determines  what  the 
topics  shall  be,  and  "Testaments,"  as  Testa- 
ments, are  not  in  the  case.  Out  of  life  the 
primal  lesson  material  is  to  come  if  it  is  to  be 
assimilated  and  lived  out  again.  The  law  of 
Unity,  says  Hughes,  teaches  that  "  isolated 
knowledge  is  unproductive,  and  that  it  will 
not  remain  in  the  mind,  even  when  relation- 
ship is  shown  by  explanations  or  illustrations 
by  the  teacher.   .  .  .  The   living   process  of 


128     POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

relationship  must  be  thought  out,  and,  if  pos- 
sible, wrought  out,  by  the  pupil  himself,  in 
order  to  make  the  knowledge  a  positive  ele- 
ment in  character.  ...  It  is  wrong  to  give 
formal  knowledge  before  laying  a  foundation 
for  it  by  establishing  apperceptive  centres  for 
it  by  experience." 

The  Sunday-school  can  as  little  afford  to 
ignore  or  to  repudiate  those  fundamental 
pedagogical  laws  upon  which  all  great  edu- 
cators are  now  practically  agreed,  as  can  the 
secular  school.  Education  is  education,  no 
matter  what  name  the  school  goes  by.  The 
Sunday-school  suffers  from  a  hallucination 
that,  because  it  is  a  religious  institution,  it 
must  educate  by  some  method  peculiar  to  it- 
self,— a  method  which  too  easily  presumes  on 
God's  willingness  to  make  good  our  senti- 
mentally lazy  shortcomings. 

It  will  be  a  long  time  yet  before  we  fully 
realize  that  the  child  under  eight  is  not  a  mere 
diminutive  adult ;  that  he  has  strictly  no  his- 
toric consciousness,  very  little  appreciation  of 
the  remote   in   cause   or  effect,  in  time  or  in 


THE    LESSON    MATERIAL.  1 29 

space ;  and  that  he  has  no  business  with  any 
series  of  facts  which,  because  of  the  half- 
wrong  impression  which  he  must  needs  get 
of  them,  make  "  utter  nonsense  or  mere 
verbal  cram  of  the  most  careful  instruction." 

The  truth  is  that  the  child  is  robbed  of  his 
right  as  a  child  by  our  everlastingly  thinking 
of  him  only  as  the  coming  man.  We  think 
too  much  of  what  he  may  be,  and  not  enough 
of  what  he  is.  The  perfect  child  is  not  made 
by  forcing  him  into  an  adult  mold.  Even 
Jesus  had  to  be  a  baby  before  he  could  be- 
come a  man.  "  It  is  dangerous,"  says  the 
immortal  Froebcl,  "  to  interfere  in  any  way 
with  a  ripening  process." 

Apart  from  this,  any  child  may  finish  his 
mission  in  childhood.  Out  of  every  thou- 
sand children,  over  two  hundred  die  before 
they  reach  nine  years  of  age.  Who  can 
measure  the  influence  which  children  have 
had  upon  history  ?  I  refer  not  merely  to  their 
attractions  and  sweetening  influence  upon  us 
— that  were  adult  egotism.  I  refer  to  their 
direct  powers, — powers  which  we  have  lost, 


130     POINT    OF    CONTACT    IN    TEACHING. 

powers   which    convention   and  artifice  have 
pressed  and  dried  out  of  us. 

"  Our  simple  childhood  sits  upon  a  throne 
That  hath  more  power  than  all  the  elements." 

It  is  idle,  if  not  immoral,  to  suppose  that 
because  we  are  trying  to  teach  God's  word 
to  children  we  can  therefore  ignore  the  de- 
mands and  defy  the  laws  of  child  nature. 
God  never  works  a  miracle  to  relieve  us  from 
our  obligation  to  use  common  sense.  Our 
Lord  respected  the  child's  point  of  view,  and 
gave  it  a  foremost  place.  He  never  told  the 
child  to  be  as  a  man,  although  he  did  tell  the 
man  to  be  as  a  child.  A  child  is  entitled  to 
all  that  goes  with  childhood,  no  matter 
whether  we  are  dealing  with  him  in  secular 
or  in  "  religious  "  matters. 

The  remedy  for  our  evils  lies  in  com- 
manding child  nature  by  obeying  child  na- 
ture ;  in  inducting  a  child  into  a  subject 
through  his  natural  point  of  contact  with  life, 
his  concrete  sense  experiences,  his  activities, 
his  appreciations,  his  affections.      In  short,  the 


THE    LESSON    MATERIAL.  I3I 

child's  Genesis  is  not  the  man's  Genesis. 
The  story  of  the  beginnings  of  things  is  by 
no  means  the  beginning  of  the  story  of 
things.  The  child  was  not  made  forties- 
sons,"  but  lessons  must  be  made  for  the 
child.  And  all  our  teaching  must  look  to  the 
education  of  the  heart  through  the  intelligent, 
loving  exercise  of  a  consecrated  will. 


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